[HN Gopher] Remote work requires communicating more, but less fr...
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Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently
Author : chmaynard
Score : 286 points
Date : 2023-08-04 15:02 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ben.balter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ben.balter.com)
| boredumb wrote:
| Remote work requires asynchronously communicating more.
| platz wrote:
| The precise concept of "more" in this article is dubious.
| no_wizard wrote:
| What I have found is this inherently means re-wiring an
| organizations culture around async communications and trust. The
| biggest hurdle that I think many aren't able to get through is
| that remote work doesn't have the same "allowance" for ad hoc
| calls / face to face meetings like offices did.
|
| Not that those were great, by they are incredibly prevalent in an
| office setting and there was never enough industry wide pushback
| to these interruptions to really put a dent in them. Remote work
| has allowed workers to put some boundaries up around this and
| made their "tax" much easier to feel and quantify by workers in
| general.
|
| This is where I have found in a nut shell is why communication
| breaks down without re-wiring it from the ground up and
| ingraining the new remote work into the culture of the company.
| You can't just lift and shift the methods from one modality to
| the other
| tonystubblebine wrote:
| We're struggling with this (80 people) and basically decided we
| have to get the entire company together twice a year. I'm not
| saying this is any perfect best practice, just that there is
| something that always gets lost in translation when we are
| remote. That gets cleared up instantly when we are together.
| briandswartz wrote:
| But what _do_ you do for the weeks and months in between? Like,
| how do people turn to one another in real time?
|
| (full disclosure, we're building a platform that integrates
| with Calendar, Zoom, and Slack to try to solve this problem and
| let people turn to one another in real-time, without
| interrupting heads-down time. Would love to interview you for
| user research if you're up for it)
| throwawayfear wrote:
| Remote work requires more direct and straightforward
| communication. Ideally in writing only because then there's no
| bullshit happening off-the-record in calls where people are
| clearly just wasting time or trying to annoy other people with
| bullshit. You can notice this the most when someone who is not
| good at their job or not technical or not interested in the
| product is always resorting to calls and constant communication.
| That's micromanagement culture.
|
| I do not think this means more communication. It means less time
| spent communicating and more time spent working on your area.
| What on earth are you all working on that requires constant
| communication?
| Aaronstotle wrote:
| I don't enjoy fully remote work, it is too isolating for me. I
| enjoy being able to talk with my co-workers in person if I
| there's an issue, I think Hybrid is a good middle ground.
| demondemidi wrote:
| these "hot takes" pick one job role and base their thesis on it.
| I work 100% remote, and I'm in meetings 25 hours a week. my job
| relies on other people doing theirs. but what can you expect from
| a 200 word "article" (with a TL;DR no less!) except click-baiting
| HN to reply with "Well at my job...". like i did.
| sussexby wrote:
| Currently in crisis because I simply can't handle communication
| in remote work. For something I do for the majority of my working
| day, I feel devoid of human interaction to such an extent that
| it's massively affecting my mental health.
|
| I regularly find myself clock-watching until the next time I can
| talk to someone because everyone is always busy - there are no
| water coolers or coffee breaks to stitch in between.
|
| Even if you create the virtual coffee break and have a chat with
| people, often we're pushed to abandon it - presumably because
| it's flipped from an opportunistic (oh, we're all of the phone,
| let's go grab a coffee) to a scheduled event which a) gets
| dropped and b) doesn't naturally recur.
| j-bos wrote:
| I have a friend who often works alone for extended periods of
| time in isolated locations and loves being with people. Similar
| to your situation, but more outdoorsy. His solution is having
| an open phone line, just have a call going and occasionally
| saying things, chatting, joking, etc, or not. Sometimes it's
| real quiet for long stretches, but it's less lonely. I'm a
| quiet guy, and even I enjoy being on those calls.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| What did you want to talk about?
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Welcome to my world. You aren't alone. Remote work absolutely
| ruined my career...
|
| I really hope what shakes out is some places are all in on the
| office and some are all in on remote. None of this dithering
| crap that came post 2020
| rcarmo wrote:
| Do more 1:1s. You'll have to chase some things piecemeal across
| two to three people, but you'll soon figure out who actually
| owns a topic and be able to have more in-depth conversations.
| avg_dev wrote:
| i had the same problem. i solved it by becoming much more
| social in my non-work parts of life.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Take your own breaks. Hang out with friends. Take a lunch. Your
| officemates do not have to be your end-all of social
| interaction :)
| dpz wrote:
| find the social outside of work? Work has always been work for
| me and nothing more, not really looking for socialising.
|
| In fairness I've been fully remote for 10 years but I see
| friends during the day for coffees, lunch, exercise. And then
| multiple sports clubs in the evenings
| whateverman23 wrote:
| > Work has always been work for me and nothing more, not
| really looking for socialising.
|
| But work is 40-50 hours of my week. That's a HUGE portion of
| my life. Almost half my waking hours are at work. (7x16=112
| waking hours a week. 35-45% of it at work).
|
| Not taking time to socialize during that period is draining
| as hell for me. I guess what I'm trying to say is you're way
| overestimating the percentage of people who can go to work
| and just... work. Most people need the socialization.
| hahn-kev wrote:
| Sounds like WFH isn't for you then.
| whateverman23 wrote:
| That's... my point. WFH isn't for a lot of people. And
| there are factions who say stuff like "Just get a hobby
| dude!" as if that fixes anything.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| I have a great social life outside of work and still felt the
| same as GP during the remote work day. And I'm pretty
| reserved at work, not known for bothering people incessantly.
| hypeit wrote:
| I have to admit as someone who enjoys WFH and would never work
| in an office again, that having co-workers like you is one of
| the main reasons. You should work on not relying so much on
| others. You may be benefiting from all that social "charging
| up", but you're taking that from the person on the other side
| of the conversation.
|
| I work to make money, not to fill someone's social void. You'll
| be happier if you explore the root cause of your issue and get
| a little more comfortable with yourself.
| jensensbutton wrote:
| I mean, they can just as easily tell you to deal with in-
| person. This isn't a particularly useful contribution imo.
| NotSuspicious wrote:
| Yet another case where capitalism incentivizes pathologizing
| natural human behavior. It is absolutely normal to want to
| talk to people, to chitchat, to be social for some portion of
| the half of your waking hours that you are getting stuff
| done. At least on assembly lines you can have some of that.
| WFH can be demonic.
| sussexby wrote:
| The root cause of my "issue" is I'm human and I've evolved to
| work with people face-to-face, not through a computer.
|
| I'm not yearning for social interaction because I need a
| friend. I've got friends and they're not at my job.
|
| I'm yearning for the variety of different communication
| methods I have in a physical domain with the added bonus that
| I can change the environment I'm in to accommodate different
| tasks.
| paulcole wrote:
| No offense to you, but this is why my next job will not be
| remote.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| They're not referring to socializing with you, per se. I see
| this mistake made all the time in these discussions. Many
| just prefer to be around other people, myself included.
| They're not necessarily the caricature of the "overly social
| office mate that needs to find friends outside of work" that
| you are implying.
|
| I really think you're overassuming your knowledge of the
| person you're responding to.
| paulcole wrote:
| It's not a mistake. People who are pro-WFH are so dogmatic
| about it (and so protective of their "right" to WFH) that
| they intentionally reduce anyone who prefers working in an
| office to somebody with no social life.
| n42 wrote:
| I guess it's unsurprising that people without the social
| capacity to handle in office work would not have the
| social capacity to empathize with someone who would.
|
| Or more fairly, probably the inverse; plenty of WFHers
| wouldn't be so derisive, we just don't hear from them
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Many of them bought homes way out in the boondocks
| assuming this covid remote crap would never end...
| paulcole wrote:
| Yeah, and? That gives them the right to put down anyone
| who likes working in an office by calling them an anti-
| social loser?
|
| Every decision has consequences.
|
| Anybody who thought "covid remote crap would never end"
| is either way more optimistic or way more pessimistic
| than I am.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Totally agree. I really hate how so many people paint
| those who want 2019 normal office interaction back are
| somehow deeply flawed and just need to straighten up and
| fly right somehow.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| I actually agree 100% with this perspective. Well said.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| This is why I went back to the office, but it took me a very
| long time to realize it.
|
| Try to exercise a lot during the day, it helps.
| sublinear wrote:
| Send your DMs when people are on "busy" status anyway. They can
| respond later. That's the huge advantage of remote work. Async
| communication is so much more efficient. If you're watching the
| clock, there's something wrong.
| hext wrote:
| Async communication is not even remotely close to
| socializing, and hardly feels like genuine human interaction.
| dinvlad wrote:
| Work != socializing. Quality work requires deep
| concentration over long stretches of time, not tapping on a
| shoulder at random intervals. Both IRL and virtually.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > Work != socializing.
|
| That's plain unhealthy.
|
| > Quality work requires deep concentration over long
| stretches of time, not tapping on a shoulder at random
| intervals. Both IRL and virtually.
|
| This has little to do with socializing or not.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| >> Work != socializing.
|
| > That's plain unhealthy.
|
| Why? I have friends and people I socialize with, I don't
| have to socialize with my coworkers. I am friends with
| people I've met along the way, but with everyone else I
| keep a distance and remain professional. Why is it
| unhealthy to have boundaries around work relationships?
| tenacious_tuna wrote:
| I keep seeing people say this, but I always sympathize
| with others who lament the lack of socialization that
| comes with remote work. I have several engineering
| friends, and myself, who all have gone full remote and
| are starting to go a little insane from feeling lonely
| all the time.
|
| "Just socialize outside of work!" seems to be everyone's
| go-to response, totally missing how much time is taken up
| by the 8+ hours of the workday, and how much ambient
| socialization has been lost with that time now spent
| remote.
|
| Sure, remote is more convenient for "deep work", but I
| honestly never had issues with that in-office: If I had
| my headphones on, people didn't bother me. If I had
| questions, I'd take them off and look around to see if
| anyone else was "surfaced" to talk to, or ping someone on
| slack. In the meantime I could kill time chatting with my
| team or going for a walk around the building--when I
| would inevitably find someone else from another team who
| was taking a break, and I could either ask them or just
| chat.
|
| Now it's just me, in my apartment, all day, except for
| maybe standup. The only reliable face-to-face human
| interaction I have is my partner when they come home from
| work--and they're usually exhausted and ready to go to
| bed in an hour.
|
| Work absolutely used to be a _significant_ portion of
| socialization--just like going to classes used to be, in
| college or secondary school. We 've absolutely lost that.
| sublinear wrote:
| > "Just socialize outside of work!" seems to be
| everyone's go-to response, totally missing how much time
| is taken up by the 8+ hours of the workday, and how much
| ambient socialization has been lost with that time now
| spent remote.
|
| You're working remote, not necessarily working from home.
| The world is your office now.
|
| For particularly meeting heavy days I have experienced no
| shame going on a daytrip while on those calls. It's
| nobody's business how you do your job remotely anyway.
| Get some coding in while stopped somewhere. Yes this
| means I have to make up for lost time in the day with all
| the interruptions. No I can't just put away the laptop at
| 5pm because I still have stuff to do (usually done by
| 8pm), but it's worth it. If Sarah from accounting is
| allowed to flex time to pick up her kids from soccer
| practice, I'm allowed to shoot the shit with random
| people I meet while getting gas or trying a new
| restaurant. There's your new watercooler. Go to the beach
| or something. If your partner is driving you around, even
| better. Use the laptop like its namesake suggests.
|
| Not exactly a "digital nomad" lifestyle, but it's such a
| mood boost to mix light travel with working hours. It's a
| win for everyone if productivity goes up from these
| little things.
| broast wrote:
| My team does collaborative sessions twice a week with the
| whole team, and has a game session once a month. Between
| all the rest of the meetings, and between the important
| work we get done through chat, I feel that we do get to
| know each other and enjoy the time we spend together
| online. Plus we have public and private social chats full
| of devs of relatively the same level or age groups where
| coworkers feel comfortable chatting about sensitive
| topics. I feel socially fulfilled by this but I can't
| know if everyone else does.
| theduder99 wrote:
| If its affecting your mental health so much, perhaps you should
| change jobs.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| I had this issue and the only way I could solve it was moving
| to a primarily in-office company. This was the best thing I
| ever did for my mental health.
|
| Not trying to start a big debate over the whole issue, but just
| sharing that I felt very similarly to you ("massively affecting
| my mental health") and that it was solved by doing the obvious:
| going back to the office.
|
| No amount of socializing outside of work or hobbies or 1:1s
| during the workday sufficed for me.
| swozey wrote:
| My team is incredibly quiet on slack and I find it pretty
| frustrating. We're under 10 people so I don't expect constant
| chat but it's not uncommon for our guild channel to have a day
| go by with no messages.
|
| I try to keep it alive by posting interesting articles, updates
| and tools and things like that and that sometimes drums up some
| conversation but it's rare that my teammates do the same thing.
|
| I'm not sure if I'm more passionate about tech, more
| extroverted, more obsessed with improving processes or just
| less busy than them. It's been like this at multiple companies
| I've been at so it's not unique to my current team. And I'm
| clearly the outlier.
|
| I just try to not take it personally and keep going. I feel
| like I post really cool things, especially new
| tools/repos/projects that benefit everyone to the void
| sometimes.
| bluefishinit wrote:
| > I try to keep it alive by posting interesting articles,
| updates and tools and things like that and that sometimes
| drums up some conversation but it's rare that my teammates do
| the same thing.
|
| It's a lot of work to read articles when people post them or
| evaluate a tool. It's even more work to form an interesting
| opinion about it and discuss it.
|
| I enjoy researching things on my own time, but I find it
| stressful to add to my workload at work, especially when it's
| not related to the other work I'm already doing.
| nickstinemates wrote:
| > I'm not sure if I'm more passionate about tech, more
| extroverted, more obsessed with improving processes or just
| less busy than them. It's been like this at multiple
| companies I've been at so it's not unique to my current team.
|
| It's none of these things. I am the same way but we are the
| minority.
| tdiff wrote:
| Am I the only one who finds that author gives very little details
| about what "working asynchronously" is and how it actually
| functions, focusing mostly on some benefits it ought to provide
| or some other behaviours benefital in traditional office life as
| well?
| lettergram wrote:
| I think gaming is very similar to remote working. You log in when
| you sit down, put in your headset and typically are available.
|
| Work isn't much different. My team leaves zoom standup open all
| day, we break into conversations all the time. It both (a) keeps
| everyone engaged and (b) removes blockers fast.
|
| That said, we setup side "rooms" we can move in and out of. There
| is also the option not to be accessible, but it's typical to be
| available
| briandswartz wrote:
| How long have you been doing this? Curious, bc many teams tried
| something like this but it fizzled after 3-4 months.
|
| (full disclosure, we're building a platform that integrates
| with Zoom to visualize all these rooms, and who is in them, so
| people can hop into the rooms where people currently are, and
| know when someone isn't available before joining, etc. would
| love to interview you for user research if you're up for it)
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Is this some kind of ChatGPT output? While I agree with the
| message, the writing feels forced, intentional and fake because
| every other sentence uses exactly three verbs or adjectives in
| order to engage, provoke and clarify. Sometimes twice in one
| sentence!
|
| "relying on constant, synchronous, and often interrupt-driven
| interactions"
|
| "Async work allows for more reflection, research, and synthesis"
|
| "Those working async can and should take the time to think,
| learn, and synthesize before sharing their ideas, opinions, or
| solutions"
|
| "form of communication for the purpose, audience, and context"
|
| "use writing for documenting, explaining, or persuading; use
| video for demonstrating, teaching, or storytelling; use chat for
| coordinating, clarifying, or socializing"
|
| "Write clearly, concisely, and comprehensively"
|
| "using simple language, short sentences, and clear structure"
|
| "provide enough detail, context, and evidence to support their
| points, answer potential questions, and avoid ambiguity."
|
| "Record videos with empathy, enthusiasm, and engagement"
|
| "using eye contact, facial expressions, and voice modulation"
|
| "keep their videos short, focused, and interactive, using
| visuals, examples, and questions"
|
| "Communicate proactively, regularly, and asynchronously"
|
| "communicate their goals, plans, and updates without waiting for
| prompts, requests, or deadlines"
|
| "communicate their availability, boundaries, and preferences"
|
| "using synchronous communication only for urgent, complex, or
| sensitive matters"
| sharts wrote:
| It SHOULD require richer less frequent communication (in fact,
| ALL work communication should probably be done that way).
|
| In practice, it is the complete opposite with context switching
| on steroids brought to you by Slack channels.
| djha-skin wrote:
| > allowing the system to optimize for throughput and flow.
|
| Sometimes you need lots of small synchronous communications and
| sometimes you need and fewer large asynchronous communications.
|
| Large asynchronous communications work when everyone already
| knows what they're doing. They work at a company which has
| already figured out its business model, built out its necessary
| expertise, and saturated its market, where everyone's a senior
| engineer. Like, I don't know, GitHub, where the OP works as a
| Director of Engineering.
|
| Frequent synchronous communications allow for tight coordination
| in the face of business risk. This is the startup world, the
| "we're-still-figuring-out-what-we're-doing", "maybe-this-will-
| work-maybe-not" area of the company stability spectrum. Also this
| is the area where junior devs are with their careers, so this
| model is best for them, too.
|
| This reminds me of parameters that can be used to tune garbage
| collection. Collectors can either be tuned for throughput, or
| availability, but not both. Throughput optimization translates to
| long stop-the-world GC pauses, where availability translates to
| more frequent, but smaller pauses so the application is available
| to take traffic.
|
| It also reminds me of a soccer player trying to control a soccer
| ball. Getting the ball down the field (throughput) is often via a
| single really hard kick. It's fine if control is reduced, it's
| throughput that is needed when the ball is too far away from the
| goal. Conversely, controlling the ball downfield requires lots
| and lots of tiny touches of the foot.
|
| One final comment: asynchronous works great for open source, so
| why not business? In short: business has a deadline, (hobbyist-
| run) open source often does not. This being the case, it's fine
| if the communication takes a little longer. But in a time-
| critical project, synchronous communication is still our friend.
| esafak wrote:
| > asynchronous works great for open source, so why not
| business?
|
| Hold your horses. Your constant synchronous communication
| reduces the aggregate throughput by increasing context
| switching, which incurs dead time for the interrupted parties
| as they refocus on their task. A better way is to reserve
| synchronous communication for urgent requests, and time block
| (batch) or async the rest.
| [deleted]
| vietthangif wrote:
| If your team uses Slack, you can utilize a bot like Membot
| (https://membot.chat) to store essential information for your
| team. This way, you can ask the bot to recall the information
| without interrupting other team members.
| mydriasis wrote:
| > Remote work requires communicating more, less frequently,
| because asynchronous communication involves less frequent, but
| richer communication, meaning there is less time talking about
| the work and more time doing it, allowing the system to optimize
| for throughput and flow.
|
| This whole thing seems to be what people struggle with about
| remote work. Communication is way, way more important, and being
| an effective communicator doubly so. There's nobody's desk to go
| stop by, so noting things down and making sure we understand
| each-other is vital to accomplishing anything.
| Swizec wrote:
| Funnily, studies have shown that people spend more time on chat
| and less time in face-to-face communication when working from
| an openspace office than when they work from home.
|
| Hopping on a quick 5min zoom is frictionless at home. Walking
| aaaaalll the way over to someone's desk and disrupting the
| entire office with your conversation, or god forbid finding a
| free conference room, is way harder. So you smear the meeting
| on slack across a 1 hour back-and-forth pingpong instead of
| doing a quick 5min sync.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180718-open-offices-m...
|
| Private offices solve this problem of course. Wfh is the
| easiest way to get that.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I've never been more productive than when I have an office
| with a door -- home or otherwise. That also makes it much
| easier to have quick chats without disturbing the rest of the
| floor.
| rcarmo wrote:
| There's a bit of a challenge today with chat, though. I work 4
| timezones away from most of my team and we all prefer to swap
| e-mails, but chat seems to have stripped away some folks'
| ability to methodically go through topics, explain options and
| summarise next steps, leading to the usual "let's set up a call
| [to actually discuss everything in the e-mail thread]".
|
| Reading through old mailing-lists (and even older e-mails from
| the same company, but from seven years ago) shows a markedly
| different communication style - you could pretty much take the
| last two e-mails in a thread and paste them into a memo that
| would neatly encompass all of the scope.
|
| Not so today--there's a constant chattering of people who just
| can't prioritise or discuss more than a couple of topics in
| tow.
| DharmaPolice wrote:
| Email is the victim of its own success. Because it had/has
| such dominance in the business world everyone had to live in
| their inbox, marketers appreciated that and lots of people
| grew to hate that. There have always been bad practices
| surrounding emails but I think it reached a point a long time
| ago where email itself was considered bad. Thus "email free
| Fridays" and internal comms plans which say email should be a
| last resort. People felt empowered to refuse to read many
| emails, especially if they were over 3-4 paragraphs.
|
| I too have colleagues who reflexively ask for a meeting in
| response to any email longer than a few lines, even though
| the issue is clearly communicated and obviously requires
| someone to read it and build a proper response. The ease with
| which we can all "jump on a call" has contributed to this.
| Yes, of course we've all seen email chains which go back and
| forth without progress but that's not a reason to assume
| every message will end up there.
| rcarmo wrote:
| We could jump on calls well over seven years ago (I
| actually worked in ISDN video calling in the 1990s, and
| spent a decade or so working in a multinational telco, with
| plenty of conference calling involved).
|
| The loss of focus definitely accelerated with the rise of
| chat.
| abalashov wrote:
| > I too have colleagues who reflexively ask for a meeting
| in response to any email longer than a few lines, even
| though the issue is clearly communicated and obviously
| requires someone to read it and build a proper response.
|
| Oh, yes. So much this. Except, I think it's fair to say
| it's managers and bosses who have this tendency, not so
| much colleagues.
| lol768 wrote:
| > I too have colleagues who reflexively ask for a meeting
| in response to any email longer than a few lines, even
| though the issue is clearly communicated and obviously
| requires someone to read it and build a proper response.
|
| I have spent many of these calls effectively just reading
| what I wrote in the email in the first place. Complete
| waste of my time.
| fuzztester wrote:
| >The ease with which we can all "jump on a call" has
| contributed to this.
|
| I hate that term and concept "jump on a call". I often find
| that people don't prepare enough before the call, which
| defeats the purpose of the call.
| isykt wrote:
| Additionally, they refuse to answer the question that's put
| to them. I am very careful with my words. I say exactly what
| I mean in as few words as necessary, but I find myself
| copying and pasting the same sentences into the chat box
| because the person or people reading seem to want to answer a
| completely different question.
| silverlake wrote:
| Yes, this is the worst. I assume some people glance at the
| question and answer their misunderstanding.
| fuzztester wrote:
| Smaller attention spans, information overload, and consequent
| lack of attention to detail, are some of the reasons, IMO.
|
| And the first two of those are largely due to the
| uncontrolled effects of the Internet, i.e. the web and social
| media, on people, of course.
|
| Edit: wording
| quectophoton wrote:
| > leading to the usual "let's set up a call [to actually
| discuss everything in the e-mail thread]"
|
| You forgot the part where the call is scheduled for next week
| even though today is Wednesday. And any attempt to discuss
| further in text is met with "let's leave that for the call".
| fuzztester wrote:
| Solid point.
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| If you want to do this really well, title the meeting
| something generic like "catch up", don't attach an agenda
| or any kind of description and invite a bunch of people who
| weren't in the original discussion.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| How do you communicate the "right things" tho? That's the part
| i find difficult. I feel like most consumers just want cliff-
| notes. Which are difficult to write for a wide variety of
| audiences.
| mydriasis wrote:
| This is tough, yes. I'm a programmer -- so for me, knowing
| what's _vital_ to a task is what I'm always searching for.
| Nailing down requirements is challenging...!
| mcguire wrote:
| Few people mention the difficulties of the other paradigm,
| though. I've had lot of hallway conversations where, if I don't
| write down some notes, it's gone. Plus, if you don't have any
| control over it, having someone stop by your desk is a
| significant interruption.
|
| Ever been in a situation where you asked someone for something
| you need done, they said yes verbally, it didn't get done, and
| now everyone is looking at you for the reason why it isn't
| done?
| brailsafe wrote:
| Ya I'd probably consider switching careers before returning
| to the tyranny of my manager just being able to pop up behind
| me. Fuck that.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| Even well done, this kind of communication doesn't substitute
| for more free-form 1:1s that in-person allows. The latter are
| key to building trust.
|
| I'm finding this to be one of the key drawbacks of remote work
| - some decisions require cross team trust and I've yet to see
| anything besides more frequent ad-hoc conversations that builds
| it. The problem is that the _most_ trust building conversations
| tend to be "off-topic" conversations that just don't happen
| organically in a remote environment. I as an individual can try
| and make these happen but I can't force the org to do so.
|
| If anyone feels like they have a solution I'd love to hear it
| (we're already doing quarterly off-sites, it's not enough)
| okaram wrote:
| Not sure if this would work for you, but I tend to have ad-
| hoc, 1on1 video calls with people.
|
| If you are not doing deep work, it's no biggie.
|
| I also would schedule 1on1 meetings to 'catch-up' (not too
| many of them, but ...)
|
| Don't get me wrong, meeting some of these people in person is
| great, but I have several great relationships at work where
| we've never met in person
| spandrew wrote:
| Not discounting this, but i Free-form 1:1's always have an
| aura of being more "improvisational" and in the moment. Good
| 1:1's are supposed to be semi-structured (ie not 'free
| form'). A shared journal, a retro exercise, etc. I have not
| had the experience that these build trust. Good team work,
| and delivering high quality work towards a common goal do
| that. You popping by for a 3 minute conversation in ear shot
| of 5 other people trying to do their work doesn't.
|
| It may FEEL like it because those people chatting get energy
| from it. But it doesn't. If you need energy from people like
| this it's 100% a good idea. Go nuts. Personally I think
| people over index on this because they have no idea how to
| structure async team comms.
|
| - Videos - Longform content - Team agreements to respond to
| things async without x-hours - Team collaboration spaces -
| Good sprint ceremonies like refinement - Team QA-type
| exercises
|
| Ad hoc conversations also contribute immensely to what I call
| "comms debt". The jolt of energy you get from water cooler
| talk last 3 minutes, and excluded anyone not in direct
| proximity. If the best idea was in the head of somebody 3
| rooms away you have no way of knowing it. Add dozens of these
| micro-interactions throughout the day and it's a recipe for
| comms breakdown and kliqish behaviour.
|
| I see this a lot in User Research. Let's "get out of the
| building" and talk to people. A good idea in practice, but
| without actual goals or hypothesis product leaders mistake
| the first 5 opinions they collected as fact -- often cherry
| picking sound bytes that fit right in with their own biases
| (and I've seen this A LOT in older leaders). This is mistaken
| as research. But they love it because it has that face to
| face energy. The feeling makes it right, regardless of the
| evidence.
|
| Trust in a team is based on good communication -- and an
| agreement on what you expect from it. If someone posts a
| video to Slack do people respond? Do you have ceremonies to
| build togetherness and understanding? All of these things are
| somewhat _easier_ when you just have to deal with Zoom
| logistics.
|
| Anyone who has to clean up and index the deluge of Design
| Sprint whiteboard stickies knows what I'm talking about. Put
| that shit in Miro, thanks.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| I think I've been unclear on the problem. Trust inside a
| single team is not something I've found to be a major
| problem, but between teams. Let's be more concrete:
|
| I need to build trust between between 6 EMs spread over
| three different directors and 2 vps + some very senior
| engineers. I need to do this so that we can solve one of
| the larger problems the business is facing. Most of these
| people have no good reason to talk to each other (or me)
| regularly. Without trust, one or more of these people will
| likely torpedo the proposal in order to avoid tying
| themselves to other teams and people they don't know.
|
| Pre-covid the solution to this problem was (mostly)
| chatting over lunch. You'd get the right people talking,
| seed the idea, and build up to a proposal that everyone
| could agree to drive forward. IME this whole style of
| consensus building is dead in a remote world because async
| communication is too low bandwidth for trust building.
|
| This makes it _really_ hard to take good organizational
| bets, you have to wait till you have a mountain of data and
| customer feedback before you can sell big projects. The
| quality of the company 's output really noticeably declines
| from this.
| ethanwillis wrote:
| Maybe part of the problem is a lot of orgs are watching(and
| logging) your remote conversations with an all seeing eye.
| But they're not necessarily bugging your in person office?
| prpl wrote:
| I don't think there is a good solution here. I realized that I
| must have a 90th-95th percentile memory when compared to my
| coworkers, but it frankly doesn't matter if I write things in
| chat or a long form document, it's often lost to much of my
| team.
|
| I have come to realize the best path forward is likely pair
| programming/working meetings (remotely) because writing things
| down and repeatedly referencing them doesn't stick
| cosmodisk wrote:
| I had this issue when I had a larger team to manage. I'm also
| one of those who remembers an email that was sent 3 years ago
| by some random guy listing all these useful things.
| However,it doesn't work for most people. The communication
| needs some guidance too 1) anything quick and simple- chat 2)
| something more complex - email 3) something complex and
| likely to stay relevant long in the future - knowledge base,
| documentation, etc 4) major announcement- medium matters less
| but they need to be stored somewhere for people to refer to
| later.
|
| Communication requires enforcement too: I had people in my
| team that kept saying that they weren't told about x,y,and z.
| If those are repeated behaviours( they usually are), they
| need to be managed accordingly so people would start take it
| seriously.
| yonaguska wrote:
| It's not a memory issue- it's an attention issue. I'm on the
| other spectrum from you- I have clinically diagnosed terrible
| memory. I write and read a lot to compensate. If you are
| writing something down- things are getting lost to your team
| because they are not taking the time to read and process what
| you wrote.
|
| I'm also finding that the best path forward is to pair
| frequently- because a lot of people just don't read. Also,
| it's important to note that with writing things down for
| people, referencing is just as important as the content. If
| something is written in a slack conversation- they are
| unlikely to go searching back months for it- when they could
| just ask you again! When something is documented in a
| structured and easily memorable manner however...
| pasc1878 wrote:
| Communication is important and does require more communication
| - but more frequently I don"t think so. You don't pop into
| somon elses space and interrupt them unless you have a reason
| and don't do that often. IRC or other chats happened a lot more
| often as the receiver can just ignore it.
| azza2110 wrote:
| I've found it's best to use a combination of written and spoken
| word, when trying to communicate more, but less frequently. i.e.
|
| - Write a set of concise, clear, well-structured discussion notes
| ahead of a meeting
|
| - Give all attendees time to pre-read the notes and flag the
| specific points requiring deeper discussion
|
| - Once face-to-face, discuss ONLY those flagged topics. Don't
| waste the opportunity for high-bandwidth communication on the
| notes/topics that aren't contentious.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| I've worked remotely for about 15 years now, and I think it's the
| same amount of communicating, it's just broken up differently
| than in-person.
|
| Instead of booking a 30 minute meeting, that only has maybe 10-15
| minutes of work talk and 5-10 of personal talk, we might instant
| message for 15-20 mins spread across a whole day.
|
| Or if things get complicated in the first few minutes we'll just
| have an adhoc call for 5 mins, then IM whatever details we
| thought of after hanging up. That 5 minute call is similar to
| swinging by someone's desk.
|
| Some people still insist on booking the 30 minute meeting, and
| that can make sense when you have several people or some
| "meetings are my job" people are involved (upper management,
| marketing, sales, etc).
|
| It seems like about the same amount of work talk either way, but
| usually less personal talk. Introverts love that, extroverts are
| missing out.
|
| It also varies by person. Some people are too vague in their
| typed messages so it's better to talk on the phone. Other people
| have really thick accents and English may be a second language,
| so a detailed IM conversation can actually be more efficient than
| talking on the phone for both parties.
| wduquette wrote:
| This is how I've been working for years, since before COVID.
| (Except for videos; I don't do videos.) As another commenter
| noted, this might not work as well for junior engineers. If I
| were mentoring/guiding/working with a junior engineer I would
| plan on being available for one-on-one interactions.
| sublinear wrote:
| > It shifts communication from a one-to-one relationship, to a
| one-to-many. Next time you're about to "send a quick DM" or
| "schedule a quick chat", consider what steps you could take to
| optimize for the long tail of information retrieval and
| discovery.
|
| This is the only real difference: that any individual can wield
| the power of one-to-many communication. We all have a voice now.
|
| Calls and DMs exist solely to ensure what's in writing is
| understood. Same as it was in the physical office for meetings.
| jensensbutton wrote:
| > asynchronous communication involves less frequent, but richer
| communication
|
| Problem is that most people aren't good at written communication.
| They're passable, but not good. This means the communication
| isn't actually "richer" it's just longer.
|
| The rise of remote has led to so many wasted hours (for the
| author and readers) due to RFCs and proposals that just never had
| the chance of going anywhere, because the people that could help
| don't have time to figure out what the author is actually asking
| for or trying to get done.
|
| Then people whine about how no one is listening to their great
| ideas.
| fnord77 wrote:
| An article just in time for the end of (most) remote work
| anoojb wrote:
| I was recently told by my manager (large FAANG) that I should
| never expect my skip manager or above to respond to my
| messages/emails. I should always book time on their calendar.
|
| After 2 years, this was when I knew that this particular manager
| was struggling with the same problems in the local working unit
| and that leadership at the VP-level (externally hired) was
| totally inaccessible to help make critical decisions.
|
| It's a tough job market, but I'm looking more ferociously than
| ever as of this week.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| It's weird seeing all this content the past 3+ years about remote
| working as I've worked remotely for 20+ years. I'm not an
| authority on the matter (why would I be), just weird to see so
| much 'authority content' on it lately.
|
| Maybe there are more granular and data-driven conclusions, I'm
| just someone who sees the benefit of communicating information
| over vast distances aka the web and appreciate that it's
| something we can do nowadays.
|
| A message, SMS, phone call, a group call, a skype call or
| whatever can clear things up right quick.
|
| Plenty times I'll send someone an email because I don't want to
| engage with someone and the time frame of their reply can be
| minutes or days. That's fine.
|
| WFH/remote is all about trust from an employer and motivation by
| an employee.
|
| You're entirely free to communicate as much as you need to
| whether you're physically present or not. The work gets done or
| it does not.
|
| I don't really understand the confusion about this.
| senttoschool wrote:
| There's a difference between the population that worked
| remotely before and after Covid.
|
| The population before Covid were often highly experienced,
| disciplined, and proven workers.
|
| The population after Covid, was well, everyone who worked with
| a laptop.
|
| Not everyone is cut for working remotely.
|
| In addition, there's a difference between 1 out 20 people
| working remotely full time and 20 out of 20.
| malfist wrote:
| I've worked remotely for about 9 years now. At the start of
| the pandemic I'd argue there's a wide gulf between those who
| knew how to work remotely because they've done it for years,
| and those forced into it and still figuring it out.
|
| We spent 3 years in pandemic mode working from home for
| everyone. We've all figured it out by now. Go into the office
| if you'd like, but don't force everyone back to it.
| tpmoney wrote:
| The problem is we haven't all figured it out. I have some
| coworkers who absolutely need to be in the office.
| Unfortunately they don't have the self awareness to realize
| that, and they heavily believe the only benefit to in
| office work is making middle management happy. They're good
| developers, but they have a bad habit of getting sucked
| into rabbit holes. Left to their own devices, they're
| highly likely to disappear for hours and come back with an
| architecture astronauts dream that technically does what
| they've been assigned but also does it in ${newest language
| or framework} with ${unsupported dependency} and
| insufficient tooling to actually deploy it into production.
|
| When they're in the office 3 things work to prevent that:
|
| 1) yes they are supervised. More senior devs and also
| management can keep an eye on them
|
| 2) They're more likely to just randomly ask a question or
| ponder aloud than they are to write something in slack, so
| it's more likely someone can catch them going off the rails
| and re-direct
|
| 3) They're more plugged into what everyone else is doing,
| so more likely to keep "coming up for air" and keeping
| their mind focused on the main goal and not the rabbit
| hole.
|
| Again, these are perfectly fine junior devs with perfectly
| fine skills, and even their tendency to get
| enthusiastically lost is just more junior dev stuff.
|
| But they don't know how to work remotely, they're not self
| aware enough to know they need to learn, they don't take
| the feedback on it very well either (again see "it's only
| because management wants butts in seats")
|
| So the options for this are mandate them to the office or
| eventually fire them for being more dead weight remotely
| than they're worth.
| repeekad wrote:
| And between those who don't want remote work. Who enjoy
| building real relationships with people and brain storming
| ideas on a whiteboard. Remote work feels like contracting,
| and when everyone is a contractor is it really a cohesive
| company?
| esafak wrote:
| You need to build rituals to recapture that cohesion; do
| things online or offline that are not just about work. It
| is a good idea even if your company is not remote.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| >20 out of 20.
|
| tbf, if you meant the full workforce it's never going to be
| 100%, there's so many jobs that require physical presence out
| of necessity.
|
| There's maybe some jobs where you could also argue it's
| required.
|
| Emergency surgery, police, paramedics, electricity grid
| maintenance, plenty jobs where there's simply no WFH angle.
|
| I'd totally agree that personality types would also clash
| from WFH, so it's definitely not the definitive solution, but
| it works for a lot of people.
| alemanek wrote:
| I have worked remotely for 7 years and in a few different
| companies in that time.
|
| In my experience the companies that struggle with remote work
| are the ones the manage via attendance. One company drove me
| insane with random "Hows it going" messages throughout the
| day so I just left for another company and let them know why
| on the way out.
|
| Managers that have enough domain expertise to manage via
| outcomes however thrive in remote environments. But, this is
| harder to do than taking headcount.
|
| Remote working environments require different approaches than
| in person or hybrid. Change is hard and all that.
| paulcole wrote:
| > One company drove me insane with random "Hows it going"
| messages throughout the day so I just left for another
| company and let them know why on the way out.
|
| But this is ideal right? Their culture is asking "how's it
| going" throughout the day and it's not a culture you wanted
| to be part of so you left.
|
| Asking "how's it going?" throughout the day isn't
| objectively good or bad - it's just not for everyone.
| antisthenes wrote:
| Asking "how it's going?" without following up about a
| specific task is objectively bad.
| paulcole wrote:
| No it isn't.
|
| You may not like it, but the idea that's objectively bad
| is your opinion not a fact.
|
| What's wrong with a company's employees deciding they
| like checking in with each other and not having it tied
| to a specific task?
| liveoneggs wrote:
| it depends on who is asking, of course
| paulcole wrote:
| No, it doesn't.
|
| Again, nothing against you if you dislike being asked how
| things are going by a coworker -- but if that is the
| culture of the company you work at, there's nothing wrong
| with it.
|
| It might be wrong for _you_ , so you either get a
| different job or learn to deal with it.
| goalonetwo wrote:
| >>> It's weird seeing all this content the past 3+ years about
| remote working as I've worked remotely for 20+ years. I'm not
| an authority on the matter (why would I be), just weird to see
| so much 'authority content' on it lately.
|
| That type of blog post is typical from so-called thought
| leaders that want to assert themselves as experts on the latest
| trendy subject.
|
| In real life, everything is a shade of grey but of course it
| makes for less of a clickbaity headline to acknowledge that.
|
| Also, the author is a _lawyer_ / _mba_ and doesn 't have a
| single experience in engineering.
| mr337 wrote:
| I feel the same, been remote for 15 years and all this
| reinventing stuff and challenges seem a little weird to me.
| There was remote work companies before COVID that had been
| learning through the challenges and optimizing for it.
| mouzogu wrote:
| f--k the "office" and f--k the soulless two-faced corpo-goblins
| who thrive within it. never going back.
|
| in 20-30 years i'll be worm food. not going to waste anymore time
| rotting in an office. f---k no.
| gumballindie wrote:
| Amen brother.
|
| People fail to understand that rotting in an office is not the
| type of memory you want when life flashes in front of your eyes
| on your death bed.
|
| Imagine sitting there, and all you see is a bunch of scrum
| meetings and planning sessions followed by scuttlebutt with
| someone your dread gossiping about someone you don't even know,
| thinking they are your friends.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| This kind of contribution is completely unhelpful but yeah
| great for harvesting upvotes I guess.
| civilized wrote:
| I think the most efficient way of communicating is about the same
| whether you're in an office or remote:
|
| - If you have a deep technical problem that you already
| understand a lot of the context for, and you can explain it like
| an expert Stack Overflow user, then use writing to ask someone
| who might be able to help you.
|
| - If you're a newbie to this context, don't know what you're
| dealing with, and there's no documentation that you can
| understand, write a much shorter message focusing on the
| immediate issue and ask if it might be most efficient jump on a
| call, ideally with screen share.
|
| - If you're somewhere in between, do your best to set up the
| problem in writing, but don't overthink it or assume too much
| about what your helper needs to know. Again ask if a call with
| screen share might be more efficient.
|
| Basically, always use writing to start, but adjust the length of
| the message based on your ability to set up the problem for your
| helper. And if it's urgent, hopefully there's some way you can
| ping or notify the person.
|
| More generally, the more you can predict about how the
| conversation should go, what details are needed by the other
| person, the better it is to use writing. The less you can
| predict, the better it is to use a synchronous medium, such as
| in-person conversation or a call with screen share.
|
| And if you find yourself always needing synchronous media, I
| would suggest that you try to do more to retain and document
| knowledge in writing, so that you're not always going back to
| square one every time you need to solve a problem. After a few
| months working in some area, it _should_ be increasingly possible
| to ask expert questions in writing.
| SSchick wrote:
| Maybe tangential but:
|
| Recently joined a new company that is remote first with a fair
| amount of juniors in it. It's rather difficult since they often
| lack guidance and start rabbit-holing in the wrong direction
| before eventually failing or producing a very non-ideal solution.
|
| For us a pure asynchronous comms workflow simply doesn't work
| well yet, this may change w/ more seniority.
|
| I found that having weekly (or even bi-weekly) 1:1's with my
| colleagues and pair/cowork dramatically lowers communication
| barriers and boosts productivity through the roof (albeit at the
| expense of 2 people working on the same project).
|
| Major issues can surface when colleagues don't communicate at all
| other than just pull requests / issues / standups / design docs
| (whatever you call them). It can cause people to perceive others
| are 'faceless entities'. This can range from building completely
| misaligned solutions to even sparking interpersonal conflict.
| willio58 wrote:
| One thing my team does is we have a daily quick standup meeting
| where at the end we all have the option to stay on. The room is
| set up to always be accessible by anyone who wants to join and
| many of us sit in the room camera/mic on or off all day just in
| case someone wants to ask a quick question. If the conversation
| gets to be really long between two people in the room we will
| split off into a breakout room. I love this method, and it's
| all optional so the days where I want to focus on work I can
| just leave after standup. Most days I stay in to either help
| people out or ask questions myself.
| briandswartz wrote:
| How long have you been doing this? Curious, bc many teams
| tried something like this but it fizzled after 3-4 months.
|
| (full disclosure, we're building a platform that integrates
| with Zoom to visualize all these rooms, and who is in them,
| so people can hop into the rooms where people currently are,
| and know when someone isn't available before joining, etc.
| would love to interview you for user research if you're up
| for it)
| qxxx wrote:
| in my current role at my current company, the opposite is the
| case. Daily sometimes hour long meetings talking about features
| and some crap and less time for the actual work. I hate it.
| Because I love to code, but I am constantly distracted. Everyone
| wants something from me... some people ask if I have time, some
| simply call, even if I am in another meeting already.
| briandswartz wrote:
| Curious: do you use DND in Slack or block your calendar in an
| effort to protect your focus time?
|
| (full disclosure, we're building a platform that integrates
| with Calendar / Zoom / Slack to visualize who is available,
| who's in a mtg, and who is in Focus Mode - the idea being to
| help people turn to one another in real-time, but _without_
| distracting people who need to focus. Would love to interview
| you for user research if you 're up for it)
| KronisLV wrote:
| > Instead of relying on constant, synchronous, and often
| interrupt-driven interactions, remote workers embrace
| asynchronous, and often higher-fidelity, forms of communication,
| such as long-form writing or thoughtful videos.
|
| This has actually been difficult for some people to get used to,
| since they much preferred synchronous communication (calls) or
| drip feeding information (what they need, spread over multiple
| messages, starting out with a simple "hey").
|
| I actually made a site a while back to elaborate on how to make
| others do context switching a bit less often, maybe it's helpful
| to some here: https://quick-answers.kronis.dev/
|
| (the other guides that I found online about this had a bit of a
| mocking tone)
|
| Of course, there are also times when you do need a bit of
| synchronous communication too, which is also fine.
| foxbarrington wrote:
| Remote work and async comms means that latency tends to be high.
| Latency issues can be overcome by not stopping to wait at each
| decision point.
|
| For example, low latency this is ok: "do you want to go to dinner
| or a movie?" Movie. "Do you want to see Barbie or Oppenheimer?"
| Oppenheimer. "Do you want to go at 6:00, 7:00, or 8:00?" 8:00.
|
| Instead for high latency, this will cut down on a lot of dead
| time in back and forth: "Do you want to dinner or see a movie? If
| you want dinner do you prefer to go to Il Capricio (Italian) or
| Sushi Go 55? I can make reservations at 6, 6:30, or 7. If you'd
| rather see a movie, do you want to see Barbie or Oppenheimer?
| Barbie is at 6:15, 7:20, and 8:15. Oppenheimer is at 6:00, 7:00,
| and 8:00." Let's do Oppenheimer at 8
|
| It's more work up front and any unchosen paths are "wasted
| effort", but for work there's usually value in fully exploring
| the alternate paths anyway.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I feel socially uncomfortable asking a bunch of questions which
| have lots of dependencies, somehow it feels presumptuous and
| overwhelming. I'm not saying it actually is presumptuous,
| there's every possibility that there's a defect in my social
| skills.
|
| Somehow I've become more comfortable just proposing a complete
| plan, but also explicitly calling out the fact that it is
| actually totally up for discussion. So instead I'll say
| something like:
|
| Want to see Oppenheimer at 5:30 on Sunday (n.b. I pulled that
| time completely out of my ass just to get the ball rolling, any
| time this weekend is fine on my end, and Barbie also looks
| good).
|
| Somehow it just feels more natural to me, I don't know why. I
| like that it presents the person with a default-path, but also
| leaves everything up for discussion if necessary.
| leidenfrost wrote:
| Another (unrelated) problem with Remote work is how harder is to
| lose weight when you stop moving throughout the day.
|
| Before the pandemic, I usually got up to make coffee, to ask for
| help or to make consensus with my fellow coworkers (other devs or
| even UX people, a few stairs away). I usually walked from work
| from time to time to clear up my mind. Now I barely move. I live
| in a small apartment. The fridge is 3 meters away from me.
|
| Back then, I could somehow manage my weight by applying some
| casual restrictions, like eating fewer carbs and eat mostly lean
| cuts of meat. Now I need to apply some zen monk level of self
| control if I want to not gain more weight. And losing it is
| terribly hard.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| For me it's the opposite. I don't have any junk food at home
| but when I was in the office I was constantly surrounded by
| pretzels, ice cream and candy bars. I also often do some work
| in the backyard while I am thinking about a problem.
| malfist wrote:
| Maybe for you.
|
| Working from home means I make healthy lunches for me. It's a
| lot easier to eat right when you have a full kitchen and pantry
| at your disposal.
| leidenfrost wrote:
| I made my lunch the day before and carried it on a small
| tupperware (how are these called?)
|
| Wasn't as great as fresh food but at least I made sure it was
| healthy.
| Aaronstotle wrote:
| I've actually gained weight since having to go into an office a
| few days a week, was much easier to exercise when working from
| home imo.
| katbyte wrote:
| Opposite for me, wfh means healthier lunches, more time and
| flexibility to be active . The short walk to transit (of not
| driving) doesn't come close
| repeekad wrote:
| It's not for everyone, but people who don't already have an
| entire life outside of work struggle to start one when the
| majority of your day is spent alone staring at a screen. The
| idea that socializing at work is a bad thing I think isolated
| a huge number of people who used to thrive on work relations
| and didn't need a huge number of close friends outside of
| work to be happy.
| biomcgary wrote:
| My company is 90% remote in practice even though almost
| everyone lives is in the greater Boston area. It has a
| Monday meeting over Zoom that starts with socializing,
| typically discussing personal events from the weekend. This
| kind of conversation might help people (particularly junior
| employees) realize that it is possible to have a life
| outside of work and give some ideas about how to start it
| (e.g., organized bike rides).
| anurag6892 wrote:
| I struggle with this too. My usual exercise routine is to run
| alternate days. With WFH, I go on 1 hour evening walks on days
| I am not running. This makes up for the lack of walking at
| home.
| throwawayfear wrote:
| This is just a description of your lack of discipline. Since
| the pandemic, I lost a significant amount of weight and
| increased my fitness across all other parameters as well. This
| is because remote work facilitated that. If you need to work in
| an office in order to get up to make a coffee or to ask for
| help or to "make consensus" then that's a you problem.
| esafak wrote:
| A lot of people don't know how to cook. Maybe the company
| offered access to a gym too. The "you problem" could be doing
| a lot of lifting here.
|
| I can cook but I appreciated not having to think about it,
| and the food was great.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| If you don't like remote work, it's always "your problem"
| somehow. Everybody has to like remote work, I guess. And if
| they don't it means they are flawed somehow.
|
| It's kinda nuts the lengths people to go put down those who
| simply hate working at home 40 hours a week.
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| For me it's the other way. I used to drive to work. Now I walk
| before and after work.
| tra3 wrote:
| Any tips for working with a remote micromanager? Constant "can
| you talk now?", even though we have a daily 1:1 scheduled in an
| hour.
|
| Written daily updates in slack followed by 45 minute stand up.
|
| I already try to overcommunicate, but it does not stem the
| interruptions and it's certainly not asynchronous.
|
| Frequent "how's it going" an hour after stand up, and before and
| after the 1:1.
|
| How do I push back?
| tomtheelder wrote:
| IMO you try these in order:
|
| - Direct feedback to the manager about your needing space to
| work and their disruptive behavior.
|
| - Same feedback to their manager.
|
| - Look for new jobs.
|
| There's no way to solve this that avoids direct feedback and
| the possibility of confrontation.
| tra3 wrote:
| Confrontation seems like the nuclear option so I'd like to
| avoid that.
|
| In the spirit of incremental improvement, what's the smallest
| action that you'd recommend that I can take?
| marcod wrote:
| I don't think things will improve if you don't say it's an
| issue (to either your mgr or theirs).
|
| If you say "hey, I'm the middle of working on X. Can't this
| wait until we have our 1:1?" do you think that wouldn't be
| well received?
|
| Also, maybe give them some information on how expensive
| context switching is.
| jdance wrote:
| Seems this is about people skills. Some people are weird
| and annoying and you have to find ways to thrive even with
| their presence, or move to another project as others are
| suggesting
|
| Many different ways of dealing with it,
|
| - from not responding at all (I do this often when people
| just "ping" without stating their business),
|
| - to asking what the matter is and if its urgent otherwise
| lets discuss it (a good while) later when I have time (I do
| this often too, my job is programming and requires focus
| time)
|
| - to just saying that you are busy right now
|
| Just a few ideas, find the guts to experiment and learn
|
| I actually rarely bring up these kind of issues with
| managers, I find its mostly about signaling and breaking
| the loop that annoying people thrive on. Learn to subtly
| draw a line, repeatedly if you must, without being
| confrontational
| bluefishinit wrote:
| Reach out and have a chat with a recruiter. Tell them about
| your situation (it's very unhealthy) and skill set and see
| what they have to say. You're currently employed, which is
| a great place to be while you look for new work. Have them
| bring you opportunities that are not just better than your
| current situation, but align with your _ideal_ situation.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| This sounds great for experienced engineers, but in my experience
| junior workers often require bite-sized guidance in order to
| avoid going down rabbit holes. A 10 second conversation could
| easily save hours of head-banging-into-wall type work for a
| junior SWE (not even exaggerating).
|
| Accordingly, during the pandemic I think it was mostly the less
| experienced engineers suffering from low productivity and lack of
| confidence (which feed into each other).
| dinvlad wrote:
| I think it's actually better for junior engineers to go alone
| for long stretches of time. That is such a huge driving force
| for their own success, when they have to learn by doing a lot
| of things on their own, without external help, and without
| someone constantly micro-managing them.
| abalashov wrote:
| I don't know. Really depends.
|
| Some of them are very independently-motivated and self-
| contained, but inexperience means they are still prone to
| rabbit holes. Others really will sit on their hands until
| explicitly told what to do, which doesn't mean they're bad or
| lazy, just that they require tight feedback loops.
|
| In both cases, it seems like quicker feedback cycles do more
| good than harm.
| m_0x wrote:
| Agreed. As a 10 YoE engineer working from home is a blessing.
| Interruptions are minimal and I can take a 15-20 minutes nap if
| I want. Before the pandemic my office provided a nap room so
| napping during business hours is NOT frowned upon.
|
| People still ping me frequently for a "quick chat" which is
| rarely quick, tho.
| okaram wrote:
| Have the 10 second conversation over video
| no_wizard wrote:
| It doesn't have to be this way though. This sounds to me like a
| huge gap in communication and on-boarding process, which
| indirectly is a cultural problem, its not a remote work
| problem.
|
| You can solve this, and many organizations have. It does mean
| re-thinking expectations around onboarding and the role of
| mentorship in the company though
| donpark wrote:
| Pair junior developer with a senior, starting with an hour
| every other day.
|
| I had more problems with junior developers who think they're
| senior developers (some experience, high-confidence) bc they
| don't ask for help when they should.
| eschneider wrote:
| Part of the job of a mentor/senior engineer is spending time
| helping get juniors up-to-speed on projects and getting them
| comfortable asking questions. And if they're not asking
| questions, checking in on them to see how they're doing. (Pro-
| tip: don't just ask them how they're doing, have them explain
| what they're doing and why. Problems show up a lot faster that
| way. :)
|
| Building an environment where junior engineers learn how to
| find things out on their own and when they need to ask
| questions is a company culture thing and has very little to do
| with remote vs in-office.
| osigurdson wrote:
| I'm convinced the strength of the "rabbit hole detector" is
| what truly differentiates software engineers. While I do think
| experience has something to do with it, I have also observed
| very senior people with terrible RHDs.
| fossuser wrote:
| Agreed, tools like gathertown can make a big difference in
| improving this problem for remote teams, but it requires buy in
| from the top and the right culture (everyone has to hang out in
| there during working hours).
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >A 10 second conversation could easily save hours of head-
| banging-into-wall type work for a junior SWE (not even
| exaggerating).
|
| Weeks, even. It took me a while to come to terms with the fact
| that this is the majority of my value to an org now. Not so
| much in my IC abilities, but in the ability to save endless
| amounts of time for lesser experienced folks.
| fsociety wrote:
| I think the experience of banging your head against the wall
| (for a bit) can be valuable. As long as the culture of the team
| encourages this and offers an escape hatch after a few hours
| (or whatever timeframe is appropriate for the problem).
| eddd-ddde wrote:
| I bang my head into the wall all the time. You just have to
| know which walls have a pot of gold behind them.
| biomcgary wrote:
| It is particularly helpful if the team answers using a text
| format that is easily searchable (e.g., Slack). Long-term
| written communication is better for building a team's
| institutional knowledge than verbal communication. I have
| saved hours of work just finding URLs and documents that _I_
| had posted, let alone others.
| rocqua wrote:
| I myself have also learned a lot from this. But I also see
| people doing it whilst they feel more pressure and less space
| to ask for help. That can lead to a non helpful state of a
| very quick shallow search for solutions. Anything complicated
| gets dismissed as 'will take too long', and you end up with
| completely suboptimal bodged solutions that, if anything,
| taught the wrong thing.
|
| Learning to do things properly by banging your head against
| the wall is great. But only if you feel like you have the
| leeway to figure out how to do things properly. Without that
| leeway, you need the space to ask for help.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > the experience of banging your head against the wall (for a
| bit) can be valuable
|
| Yes. This "get it done as fast as humanly possible whether or
| not you actually understand what you're doing" is the most
| detrimental attitude toward beginning software developers I
| can think of. "Going down a rabbit hole" is a dismissive way
| of saying "actually figure out what the computer is doing"
| which is what actually makes you valuable to the team. If you
| just wanted somebody who can type in what they're told to
| type in, you're wasting a lot of money hiring computer
| science graduates.
| nerdponx wrote:
| What's worse, you're actually hurting their future career
| by allowing (or encouraging) them to develop bad
| intellectual, work, and communication habits. Borderline
| abusive IMO because the junior doesn't realize they've been
| misled until much later.
| newsclues wrote:
| It a useless exercise to have people do so for solved
| problems.
|
| Sure, reinventing the wheel every time is a valuable
| experience, but it's not efficient to relearn how to do
| things every time.
|
| This is like letting toddlers struggle to learn how to tie
| shoes themselves, sure they will eventually figure it out,
| but it's better to just teach people have to do the basics,
| and let people bang their heads against hard problems.
| lapcat wrote:
| > This is like letting toddlers struggle to learn how to
| tie shoes themselves
|
| Junior engineers aren't toddlers. Hopefully they're a lot
| more competent. Nobody hires toddlers to do work.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| It's just an analogy. human progress is made from
| "standing on the shoulders of giants" not starting from
| scratch.
| lapcat wrote:
| It wasn't a good analogy. For one thing, toddlers don't
| tie their shoes: the average age for learning to tie your
| shoes is 6 years old. And it's not clear that kids will
| learn for themselves if you give them a few hours. We're
| not talking about letting junior engineers struggle for
| weeks or months, but they can bang their heads for a few
| hours or maybe even a few days and figure out a lot of
| things for themselves. That's a useful skill to acquire.
|
| Here's my analogy: if you want to learn how to ride a
| bike, you've got to take off the training wheels, and
| sometimes that means falling over.
| jewayne wrote:
| I don't think you get it. Letting a junior engineer bang
| their heads for a few days on something you could show
| them in ten minutes is just a waste of time and money. In
| my experience there are PLENTY of real problems for them
| to solve, things I DON'T know the answer for.
| lapcat wrote:
| You can't just consider one question and one answer in
| isolation. The questions and answers add up. It's a waste
| of the senior engineer's time to spend ten minutes each
| answering every question of junior engineers who are
| constantly asking questions, seemingly incapable of
| helping themselves. The senior engineer becomes a
| glorified babysitter, and the junior engineers then never
| learn to solve problems for themselves, which will waste
| everyone's time in the future.
|
| Not every problem is going to take junior engineers days
| to solve for themselves. I was stating an upper bound of
| how much rope to give them, not an average.
|
| Besides, what happens when the senior engineer leaves the
| company? Sometimes "institutional knowledge" walks out of
| the institution.
| bfeynman wrote:
| exactly, the most frustrating type of behavior for any
| colleague (esp jrs) is those who just default to consistently
| ask for help instead of diving deep. That behavior is costly
| in slowing down others. People need to learn how to learn,
| otherwise they will just be handicapping team if they cannot
| function independently. At the same time, navigating large
| proprietary or new knowledge sources can be tedious and
| sometimes impossible, but I have found that starting from the
| ask first mentality to be a positive feedback loop for never
| diving deep.
| kritr wrote:
| I think if you have a good mentor or guide in a space where
| there might be a proprietary system, it's a lot easier to
| start being able to do those deep dives. I found that when
| people were able to explain the larger context for the
| question I was asking, I would be able to move along faster
| and deep dive, but with brief answers that didn't really go
| beyond my surface level questions, I ended up having to ask
| a lot more questions, sometimes finding certain information
| was never documented.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > default to consistently ask for help
|
| Don't necessarily blame the developer - there's a _lot_ of
| pressure from the PHB that doesn't understand the
| difference between HTML and Linux to "get it done right
| now" and they think (for no reason) that nagging somebody
| else to do it for you is the most efficient way to do that.
| pydry wrote:
| I dont. Ive gone down many rabbit holes thanks to, for
| instance, subtly incorrect or outdated docs in working
| cultures that valued not being interrupted and it's a recipe
| for anxiety and a huge waste of time.
| andsoitis wrote:
| Hopefully you updated the docs as you encountered them and
| figured out the most up to date context.
| pydry wrote:
| I dont think I even had edit rights. I was also under
| pressure to do my actual job.
|
| I would have loved to have been working in an environment
| where I could work with the system maintainers to fix
| their docs collaboratively but alas it was more of an
| "I'm busy go away" type environment.
|
| I think this type of dysfunction was fairly common during
| lockdown WFH.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > Hopefully you updated the docs as you encountered them
| and figured out the most up to date context.
|
| I've been in an environment like this, and it really
| burned me out.
|
| People broke docs faster than I could fix them, and it
| was an accepted part of the development process.
|
| My conclusion was that fixing the docs was simply a waste
| of time. My resulting despair for the software and the
| company surely destroyed my productivity. (I'm not saying
| this is a valid excuse; just an explanation.)
| prepend wrote:
| > My conclusion was that fixing the docs was simply a
| waste of time. My resulting despair for the software and
| the company surely destroyed my productivity.
|
| What did you do instead? It's certainly frustrating to
| have people breaking docs that you fixed. But what else
| is there. You just figured it out on your own and left
| the docs broken?
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > What did you do instead? It's certainly frustrating to
| have people breaking docs that you fixed. But what else
| is there.
|
| I concluded that it was a fatal and unfixable flaw in
| that community / product / company. This sapped my
| motivation, and I'm sure resulting burnout was a factor
| in eventually being laid off.
|
| One thing that sucks about being a senior dev is you're
| subject to Cassandra [0] syndrome. In a tight labor
| market, that gets painful.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra
| bravetraveler wrote:
| Yep, this is learning. Asking for help is a key part. Without
| trying first, asking for help is asking for someone to do it
| for you.
|
| In office, remote, whichever - I've been ignored. It took a
| while to learn to ask questions.
|
| People will help, but "the squeaky wheel gets the grease",
| and all. There's _movement_ [or an attempt] implied with
| this.
|
| The locality doesn't matter, effective communication can
| exist in either.
|
| It's possible to foster a remote environment where Juniors do
| ask questions - I've worked in several. As such, I'm
| skeptical of this _' Think of the Juniors'_ concern. It's
| manageable.
|
| It's also worth pointing out, Junior and Senior aren't
| diametrically opposed. It's relative and nebulous depending
| on context.
|
| I'm a Senior _Architect_ , but know very little about the
| specifics of our network devices - for example. I'm Junior to
| our 'Network Engineering' team, making an Ouroboros of
| Seniority
|
| Recognizing where strengths are helps greatly. Productive
| environments have their Seniors evangelizing this awareness
| travisjungroth wrote:
| > As such, I'm skeptical of this 'Think of the Juniors'
| concern. It's manageable.
|
| The top comment is saying how to manage it. TFA isn't
| saying no remote work, it's saying less frequent
| communication. That doesn't work in all cases. Struggling
| for hours without getting much done or understanding more
| isn't effective for productivity or learning _by
| definition_. These cases can often be prevented with quick
| questions. "Send me an email, I check it every Monday and
| Thursday" doesn't support that.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| My skepticism isn't aimed at them
|
| This can be prevented without (net) more involvement...
| with better use of those existing sessions, perhaps
| splitting them.
|
| The definitions on that aren't clear - the comments
| around seem to expect the worst, absent employers abound.
|
| I expect a fairly guided mission, with reports on
| findings. Questions both ways, Socratic or not.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| On the one hand, I agree from personal experience. Banging my
| head on the wall is how I've learned quite a lot of what I
| know and developed many helpful instincts.
|
| But on the other hand, I think that value comes from more
| than the persistence alone: it depends a lot on what you hope
| to get out of it. And I also say this from experience.
| Banging my head to "make it work" has almost always been an
| enormous waste of time and effort, but to "learn how/why it
| works [or not]" has been the exact opposite.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| Totally agree. But with newbies I feel it's very important to
| check from time to time if they are banging their heads on
| the right wall.
| grozmovoi wrote:
| Absolutely agree. I think remote engineering work is a skill
| that is hard to acquire when you're very junior.
| Tade0 wrote:
| Dealing with frustration is part of this job.
|
| Also this is trivially solved through checking on the person
| twice a day and doing call reviews, thus making it _at most_ a
| few hours.
|
| Actually, this is a regular part of successful remote team
| building.
|
| Meanwhile making the junior approach unannounced is
| counterproductive. I for one would rather have my interruptions
| at least scheduled if they can't be avoided.
| ResearchCode wrote:
| Those "rabbit holes" are where you learn. Saving hours is more
| important if you bill hourly, less if you are salaried.
| itsmemattchung wrote:
| Generally agree that rabbit holes (or as my wife calls mine:
| black holes) can be conducive to learning. But I suspect that
| there's diminishing returns. At some point, you may end up
| spinning your wheels and reaching out for help does not
| distract from learning the valuable lesson.
| ResearchCode wrote:
| If you're doing a PhD, that point is a weekly chat with
| your supervisor. I don't see why a few hour "rabbit hole"
| would be a problem in software engineering. If we're even
| discussing hours unless billing hourly, that's a red flag
| for micromanagement.
| throwawayfear wrote:
| Indeed. There may be a toxic or stupid management culture at
| that company if they're worried about someone going down a
| rabbit hole to learn. In my experience this is usually in
| teams that are run by people who don't have technical
| ability.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| Going down rabbit holes and getting something out of it is
| fine, but that doesn't always happen.
|
| Sometimes people are just frustrated and spinning their
| wheels, or doing work that turns out to be pointless
| because they failed to understand something which would
| have been clarified by a short conversation.
| throwawayfear wrote:
| That can be measured by frequency of code commits. You
| can tell which juniors are making the most of a rabbit
| hole and becoming better versus which ones are mindlessly
| surfing because they don't want to think. The first group
| will have things to share or talk about if they go some
| time without committing code and their mentor or manager
| starts getting worried.
|
| If someone hasn't pushed something in a week or two,
| that's a good time for their mentor to initiate a
| conversation and see where they're at and when they think
| they will push something.
|
| Anything else is micromanagement by a company that has
| hired someone without giving them any amount of runway to
| actually work and learn the space they're in. You can
| also tell on company hardware and on company accounts if
| the junior's browsing history represents getting better
| or just resting on their haunches because they want
| someone else to do the thinking. Let's not pretend the
| micromanagement cultures where "fear of rabbit holes"
| exists are not already doing this.
| jzm2k wrote:
| >You can also tell on company hardware and on company
| accounts if the junior's browsing history represents
| getting better or just resting on their haunches because
| they want someone else to do the thinking.
|
| Are you saying the mentor should actually go and check
| the browsing history of one their engineers to verify
| whether they've actually done "correct work" or what are
| you trying to say exactly? This sounds to me like
| micromanagement of the highest order.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| A 10 second conversations sounds like a slack message to me, or
| providing the guidance before they go down the rabbit.
| jayd16 wrote:
| The difference is you can tell on someone's face whether
| they're struggling or cranking away without bugging them.
|
| "Give guidance before" is about as good a "just don't make
| mistakes."
| willio58 wrote:
| This is very true. For interns and junior devs if the team is
| remote the seniors need to set aside time to help them out
| daily. I've started doing this as a senior dev on my team,
| basically setting time for office hours, and it's been great so
| far.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Office hours is an ironic choice of words.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > but in my experience junior workers often require bite-sized
| guidance in order to avoid going down rabbit holes. A 10-second
| conversation could easily save hours of head-banging-into-wall
| type work
|
| This is why I more or less never go and "do my own research"
| before asking questions for hobby projects. I've gotten stuck
| in too many research rabbit holes and (hopefully) have learned
| my lesson. Ask first, then get mired in irrelevant details if
| the response to my bizarrely unique question is crickets.
| x86x87 wrote:
| Oh.. The poor juniors.
|
| Instead of properly adapting the onboarding and mentoring to
| the remote setting let's romanticize the good old ways that
| imho sucked.
|
| Let's cherrypick and pretend everything is fine. We went from
| offices to cubicles to open space and nobody stopped to think
| if it was a good idea. Wr transformed the office from a place
| where work actually is done to a placr where we "socialize".
| Work? Do that on your own time.
| malfist wrote:
| To add to your point. Just because there's a tradeoff one way
| doesn't mean we shouldn't make that tradeoff.
|
| Yeah, there might be some impacts to junior engineers. But if
| it improves the efficiency of your more expensive senior
| devs, isn't it worth it?
|
| And just because your team has a problem with onboarding and
| mentoring junior devs in a remote environment doesn't mean A)
| Everyone has the same problem, B) you can't fix that problem
| yourself. Self improvement is the name of the game here
| anyway
| eru wrote:
| > We went from offices to cubicles to open space and nobody
| stopped to think if it was a good idea.
|
| People have been complaining about this development since
| forever. I'm not sure who that 'nobody' in your sentence is?
| grumpy_coder wrote:
| That nobody is obviously within the people making the
| decisions. The people complaining were a whole different
| set of nobodies.
| x86x87 wrote:
| My point is that we are invoking this alleged benefits when
| it serves a narrative but just ignore it when it's
| convenient for the "bottom" line
| dang wrote:
| Can you please make your substantive points without
| fulminating, snarking, or posting in the flamewar style? This
| is in the site guidelines:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
| repeekad wrote:
| I was one of those juniors, the rapid shift to remote work
| ruined me. I had just moved to a new city where I knew no one
| to start a life doing the work I loved, and all at once I got
| told leaving my house was dangerous and to stay home alone
| all day staring at a screen to keep people safe, for 2+
| years...
|
| It's great you value work life balance, but junior engineers
| suffered a lot (to different degrees), and you being on edge
| that remote work might be taken away from you is nothing
| compared to what I went through and haven't recovered from.
|
| We're allowed to love our work and the people we do it with,
| that's my ideal, just a because you hate it doesn't mean
| everyone should
| saurik wrote:
| Look: except for a few months in high school, I have never
| worked for a stereotypical company where I would go into an
| office and do work with other people; I have always worked
| by myself or remote. I relish working alone and have never
| had an issue with it; I've even been quite fanatical about
| it, trying to make sure everyone knew how great this
| lifestyle was (one which I learned from my father, who
| worked for a company half a world away from him, from a
| home office where he was always accessible to his son: me).
|
| But... the pandemic also broke me. Bad. I wasn't at all
| prepared for life _trapped_ inside where my _only_
| interaction with human beings I knew was via video. There
| were like four months in early 2021 where I only had about
| four interactions with flesh and blood humans whose name I
| knew (like, not some entirely random person)... one of them
| was the guy who lived in a nearby park whom I normally
| avoid as it is so difficult to end conversations. I gained
| a ton of weight and at one point--end of 2020--I had given
| myself some kind of weird anemia (I think from lack of B12
| in my stupid closed-in diet).
|
| Like: I am someone for whom his entire life normalized
| remote work and who thrived in such an environment and yet
| the pandemic was so hard I still haven't really
| recovered... thinking about it _makes me cry_. (And like,
| yes: I could have better managed my lifestyle or better
| handled the loneliness. Whatever. That is also true for
| you, and I at least am not judging you for that.) It is one
| thing to not work in an office--you can work from anywhere!
| and there are a ton of people who you can get to spend time
| with--and it is entirely another thing to work explicitly
| from a small room in your home day in and day out for a
| year without human contact.
|
| I thereby want to posit that maybe--just maybe--the issue
| isn't working remotely but being forced to stay at home and
| at times even fear going to the supermarket. There were
| periods during this thing when people were even afraid to
| meet up outside, and so human contact for white collar
| professionals outside of relationships was pretty much just
| verboten. The world was in a shitty place, and you
| shouldn't judge working remote based on the experiences you
| had during a pandemic without even trying to control for
| the existence of a pandemic as part of your analysis.
| repeekad wrote:
| I vividly remember trying to meet up with the few people
| who stayed behind and didn't move to their parent's lake
| house during covid, one person in the group being
| concerned about even meeting up outside and everyone else
| not wanting them to be left behind, so we did virtual on
| zoom. Laughs and fun, then with a button press the screen
| flicks black and you're alone again in your tiny
| apartment you signed when the plan was to spend almost no
| time there.
|
| You're right, I do still think there is value working in
| person, but remote work by itself isn't what caused this,
| even if it's still what happened.
|
| Hindsight has made all this more clear, but imo
| loneliness is a silent killer around the world today, and
| covid threw jet fuel on the fire.
| osigurdson wrote:
| I can sympathize, but you should not have let it ruin you.
| Take responsibility for your own life.
| [deleted]
| repeekad wrote:
| When you're alone, someone telling you it's your own
| fault and just take responsibility for it can feel really
| dark
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| I had the same timeline as you, but it was fine for me.
| Granted, I've never known anyone anywhere I've lived and
| barely leave home anyway. :p I'm grateful I seem optimized
| for the fully atomized cyberpunk existence which may only
| become more intense and universal in the future.
| [deleted]
| x86x87 wrote:
| You need social in person interaction as a human being.
| Nobody is disputing that. Should you rely on your work to
| get that interaction and can you make the claim that it
| helps your work?
| [deleted]
| abalashov wrote:
| Considering that it delivers a feeling of productive
| communion, the camaraderie and esprit d'corps of solving
| problems together, and generally feeling useful, the
| answer might be yes. Especially if, as an adult, it's
| where you spend most of your waking hours.
|
| Don't misunderstand me, I'm not romanticising the
| marriage of one's social life to one's workplace, nor
| overlooking the ways this "we are more than a company,
| we're family" rhetoric benefits employers at the expense
| of their employees' outside lives and broader well-
| rounded and fulfilment. But I think asking people to
| separate them in an extreme way is just as untenable.
| slily wrote:
| I've worked in cubicles and open space plans as well as
| remotely as a junior. It seems self-evident to me but maybe
| those who haven't experienced the various environments do not
| realize that in person it is _much_ easier to ask a random
| question to a senior. You can poke them and have a small
| discussion that would flood a chatroom and take much longer
| to develop remotely, without feeling like you may be
| inconveniencing them or the rest of the team since you cannot
| see if they are busy, or you can follow them to the coffee
| machine and discuss issues that are not urgent but could use
| their input instead of just notifying them over chat at a
| random time that may or may not be convenient.
|
| Working remotely I found myself _constantly_ wasting time
| trying to figure things out on my own because I don 't know
| if people are even online/active (spread out across the
| globe, another issue common with remote), if they are online
| I don't know if they have something more important to deal
| with at the moment, it is more difficult to extract
| information from seniors who are poor communicators - as good
| as they may be as ICs, most of my seniors will assume I
| should know every undocumented internal mess and it makes
| asking for more details intimidating. And I don't want to
| look like an idiot in writing! (lol, but I do feel that way
| sometimes)
|
| If you want juniors to learn anything in a reasonable amount
| of time you have to give a bit of a shit and invest more time
| solely towards that especially in remote environments, seems
| that people just expect juniors to take the lead and force
| their way in though which isn't my style at all and if there
| isn't a common agreement and people are all just doing their
| thing it can come off as presumptuous to be bugging people
| left and right for the first months. Yes part of the problem
| is company culture not properly adapting to the environment,
| but I also haven't seen any change in the way we deal with
| communication since the Corona and of course seniors don't
| care because they got their job security.
| bloopernova wrote:
| If your team penalizes you for "asking questions and
| looking like an idiot" then the team culture is poor.
|
| Nobody knows everything. Everyone makes mistakes. The team
| should help those people but they need to ask.
|
| Today I was looking in the wrong devtools tab for a token
| value. Because we've worked hard making our team a safe
| place in which to ask questions, I felt comfortable asking
| what I was missing. Heck it's give and take, I know way
| more DevOps and Linux-y stuff, the devs know more about
| their job.
|
| Because we try to think as a team, we do better and have
| less interpersonal clashes. I still complain about things
| each dev does, that's natural, but our team does pretty
| well together.
| slily wrote:
| > Today I was looking in the wrong devtools tab for a
| token value. Because we've worked hard making our team a
| safe place in which to ask questions, I felt comfortable
| asking what I was missing. Heck it's give and take, I
| know way more DevOps and Linux-y stuff, the devs know
| more about their job.
|
| That's easier to do when you're more or less on "equal
| footing", but if you're a junior, it can take months to
| years to develop knowledge that seniors don't (depending
| on several factors). That's the problem, it takes much
| longer to reach a point where you have knowledge that is
| equivalent to that of seniors if the culture doesn't lend
| itself to frequent and high-quality communication and you
| have to learn about internal tools, processes, code bases
| and such largely solo. If you share a physical space with
| seniors you'll at least have some common downtime like a
| coffee or water break to "bother" them and it can save
| minutes to hours of tedium each time.
|
| So either you end up being "that guy always asking stupid
| questions in the chat and interrupting my work" or you
| spend a lot of time spinning your wheels pointlessly for
| months/years on end. The first approach leads to
| unhelpful and delayed responses and the latter makes you
| so inefficient that you favor lower quality work so that
| you can actually deliver something.
| theideaofcoffee wrote:
| This is such an important point I don't think it can be
| overstated. Psychological safety is one of the key things
| to have a well-functioning culture and it's one of those
| cultural things that I've tried desperately change in
| past positions. It's hard, and in one place, almost
| impossible save for eliminating a few key people who hold
| onto that mindset and clean house a little bit.
|
| There is no growth, no team cohesion in an environment
| where you're berated for asking seemingly stupid or dumb
| questions. But I think people become numb and
| indoctrinated to it because "well, I had to endure this
| when I was learning" is such a demoralizing and abusive
| stance and nobody wants to change.
|
| Things work so much better when everyone has a chance to
| pitch in, even if some ideas are dumb, just having the
| option is miles ahead of whatever bullshit people can
| justify from the "old way".
|
| Part of the process to change I've found is just leading
| by example. I'll intentionally ask stupid questions that
| I know raise the ire of my similarly-leveled coworkers
| just to make the point to the more junior people that
| "hey, this staff-level guy is asking this, I might be
| able to too". Junior people will gradually start to get
| the picture and ignore the rantings and ravings and
| toxicity of the debbie-downwers and the sticks-in-the-
| mud.
| grumpy_coder wrote:
| As the person you kept interrupting and following to the
| coffee pot, I much prefer this new way of working.
|
| To be clear, labelled as an 'IC' I have zero interest in
| training you. You will job hop at the first opportunity,
| and never lift a finger to help me in the future.
| slily wrote:
| With that attitude yes I'm not surprised that people
| would be tempted to jump ship.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Hate to bang the same drum over and over, however this very
| much sounds like a culture problem, based on
|
| > if they are online I don't know if they have something
| more important to deal with at the moment, it is more
| difficult to extract information from seniors who are poor
| communicators - as good as they may be as ICs, most of my
| seniors will assume I should know every undocumented
| internal mess and it makes asking for more details
| intimidating. And I don't want to look like an idiot in
| writing! (lol, but I do feel that way sometimes)
|
| Sounds like the company lacks good culture, process and
| guidelines on expected patterns of communication and
| behavior. There _should_ be an onboarding buddy when things
| are implemented well.
|
| Its not your fault, at all. Its the company. Its not
| inherent to remote work though
| x86x87 wrote:
| Hard disagree with random questions. If it's easy to ask a
| random question you're just going to keep asking random
| questions. How about you write down that question and try
| to formulate the answer or a strategy for finding the
| answer?
|
| Here is a workflow I made all people I mentor go through:
| 1) what is the problem? 2) why is this a problem? 3) what
| are you actually seeing? 4) what have you tried to solve
| it? What are the results?
| jewayne wrote:
| Allowing a noob to spin their wheels for too long isn't
| just wasteful, it sets the exact wrong tone. The goal is
| not to "figure everything out for yourself". It's to GET
| THINGS DONE.
| slily wrote:
| "Random questions" doesn't mean questions without any
| thought put into them. It just means anything helpful
| from workflow or environment related questions to code
| style or processes that are not documented or easy to
| find. vs. wasting time trying to find things that don't
| exist or reinventing the wheel, which is more tempting to
| do when you can't see what your coworkers are doing and
| don't want to risk offending people who have no interest
| in passing on knowledge, like a sibling of your comment.
| extr wrote:
| Well said. I am currently working my way through an
| unfamiliar codebase and even as a mid-career developer, I
| find it intimidating and inconvenient to continually ask
| for help over slack for "basic questions". People say the
| answer is to go deep and gain expertise, but in my
| experience you need to reach a certain escape velocity with
| the codebase before that kind of spelunking becomes
| valuable learning experiences and not just a confusing and
| messy waste of time. You need either:
|
| * Documentation that is up to date and answers not just
| technical details but the "why" behind the architecture.
| Something that shows you where to focus and where the
| frontier is.
|
| * Defined, limited scope (at first). Scoping yourself to
| the entire codebase is a good way to become an expert in
| nothing. You need a foothold where you can gain expertise
| and give yourself a jumping off point to adjacent areas.
|
| The latter is easier to accomplish than convincing everyone
| to write pages of docs that don't exist.
| spike021 wrote:
| Nothing about what they said is socializing.
| whateverman23 wrote:
| > Instead of properly adapting the onboarding and mentoring
|
| But... how? Remote check-ins with juniors every 30-60
| minutes? That's crazy. But that's basically the only way to
| replicate the in person experience.
|
| The best mentoring results for me as the mentee and for me as
| a mentor have been when we're sitting next to each other. The
| mentor can visually tell when the mentee is stuck, and mentee
| can tell when the mentor isn't focusing on anything important
| and is more willing to ask for help.
|
| No matter how many times you tell junior engineers to ping
| you at the first sign of trouble, they're not going to do it.
| They're going to toil for way longer than needed, unless
| you're sitting right next to each other.
| x86x87 wrote:
| Yew, if only we could assign a senior engineer to watch
| over every new person that joins /s
|
| Part of learning to be a sw developer is learning how to go
| about your work. Learning when to ask for help. If someone
| is doing this for you, you'll never going to learn.
| criddell wrote:
| Why the /s? I happen to agree with that statement.
|
| Part of being a senior engineer is to use the mentorship
| skills you developed along the way and make judgements
| about how much struggle is right. Every new person
| _should_ have a more senior partner with whom they can
| ask the dumb questions and not be made to feel dumb.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > learning how to go about your work
|
| There are whole college degree programs designed to teach
| this, in fact.
| malfist wrote:
| Who suggested checking in with juniors every 30-60 minutes?
| GP certainly didn't. You're arguing against a strawman.
| whateverman23 wrote:
| Sorry I edited to include my point there. If you don't
| have 30-60 minute check-ins with juniors, they're not
| going to have the same rapid feedback that they'd get
| from in person mentoring.
|
| And very importantly, I'm saying 30-60 minute remote
| check-ins are an absolutely insane idea that should never
| be implemented.
|
| I don't know any kind of remote system that provides for
| anything even close to the power of in-person mentoring.
| x86x87 wrote:
| Lol. Are those juniors in the room with us right now?
|
| How about letting them figure it out and provide
| opportunities to chat and ask questions from time to
| time. Everyone wants superdevelopers but everyone expects
| that you're going to put a complete noob in a room with a
| senior developer, they're gonna rub hand and in 2-4 days
| you're going to have another senior developer. That's not
| how it works.
| ta1243 wrote:
| > But... how? Remote check-ins with juniors every 30-60
| minutes? That's crazy. But that's basically the only way to
| replicate the in person experience.
|
| We've used day long zoom windows or slack huddles. Keep
| muted until you want to say something. Slack is the same
| thing, just send a message.
| belval wrote:
| I like to do virtual desk with Slack, where I will have a
| channel where I'm always in a huddle and they can drop by
| when they have questions, just like they would in-office.
|
| I have to say as a counter point though that I've had a lot
| more trouble with coworkers coming to my physical desk for
| questions that they could have Googled than with Junior
| getting stuck for extended period of time remotely. It's
| all a matter of culture and relationships.
| pnutjam wrote:
| 100% this. Keep an open channel for IM and setup regular
| shadowing. I've been on both ends, learning and teaching.
| It's way preferable to have your own computer, shared
| screen vs trying to look at another screen and taking
| notes. Remote is better for collaboration and training.
| Proper documentation is a big part of it, and open
| channels for IM, like slack.
| whateverman23 wrote:
| > Remote is better for collaboration and training.
|
| Oh come on... I get arguing that there are ways to make
| remote training good enough. Maybe even similar. Maybe
| even a net-positive when you look at the entire picture
| (including the productivity and happiness of your senior
| staff). But saying remote is _better_ for training
| specifically? No way. That makes no logical sense.
| pnutjam wrote:
| Please elaborate how it's better in person? Remote: I can
| see and hear the person. I can see their screen. I can
| copy past back and forth (as can they) through the screen
| sharing app. I can invite others into the training pretty
| much instantly. I can send links and commands typed
| properly in the chat. User can record session for later.
|
| In person: Usually have to face the person or the screen,
| can't see both. I have to write down commands and pass
| them, or type them myself. There is a delay finding
| others if we need to talk to them. More chance to
| transpose commands incorrectly by the user. Harder to
| record the session without losing parts.
| whateverman23 wrote:
| Everything you can do remotely, you can do in person as
| well. I don't know why you think you can't screen share
| or send links and commands in a chat if you're in person.
|
| So at minimum, in person would be the same. So I can't
| possibly see how in person could be worse.
| pnutjam wrote:
| So you're just ranting, no data and looks like no
| experience. OK
|
| In person is worse. I've done both. It's noisier, you're
| crammed into a cube taking notes, etc. If you're going to
| use remote tools, what's the benefit of in person?
| whateverman23 wrote:
| > looks like no experience
|
| Got it, I see you're in the "make up stuff about the
| other person" phase of the discussion. No point in
| continuing here.
| pnutjam wrote:
| Sure, all you ever said was you could not believe and you
| could do remote stuff in person. Way to support your
| statements.
| lambersley wrote:
| Agile environments are much better at this. Its inherent
| frequent touchpoints and "fail fast" mindset can help to
| ensure the juniors are getting as much information and
| direction as required.
| throwawayfear wrote:
| The juniors will have to read documentation and spend long
| hours writing and reading code and understanding what has
| already been built. Just like all of us who did that and
| had to do it in order to move up. The idea of spending time
| "mentoring juniors" has always ended up being an euphemism.
| It's just a way for non-technical people, at the end of the
| day, to consume as much time as possible from other people
| so they can pretend to be doing work.
|
| It's clear which juniors are motivated and will make the
| most of the mentorship and which ones are not. Some are
| just there for the check and you cannot compromise your
| senior and higher talent on people who don't want to learn
| and grow and just want the prestige and check of a high-
| tech job. It's the same situation with someone who is
| drowning not listening to orders and taking down their
| rescuer with them too.
|
| If a junior needs someone to sit next to them because they
| toil for way longer than needed on clear simple
| requirements and goals, this may not be the field for them.
| I never needed anyone right next to me that couldn't have
| been a direct message or a brief remote call to clarify
| something specific, clear, and to the point. You're
| describing a reality where the people who don't do are just
| trying to take as much time for themselves as possible to
| hide the fact that they don't want to think.
| asyx wrote:
| It's really not an issue to have a junior bang their head
| against the wall for a few hours and then telling them that
| they should have gotten help sooner.
|
| They won't do that every single time. At some point they'll
| realize that asking for help isn't an issue.
| mejutoco wrote:
| Pair programming sessions.
| lukeschlather wrote:
| Effective use of group chat works well. The most effective
| remote teams, there are little conversations happening in
| the team Slack, often more than once per hour that can go
| for 5-10 minutes. Some people are bad at communicating over
| text but some people are also bad at communicating in
| person and in-person just biases for the latter, it's not
| inherently better. It can be helpful to hop on video but
| there's a ton of ways to communicate, often more
| effectively and less disruptively.
| manvillej wrote:
| I still think that is a culture problem. I have a team of
| engineers that frequently has a lot of junior engineers. I find
| it really REALLY important to reinforce the culture of
| "software development is a team sport" and provide concrete
| mechanisms to do so.
|
| Junior engineers need help as the same rate they did before.
| They still need to ask for help. Remote work lets it:
|
| - happen asynchronously & synchronously
|
| - creates visibility of asking for help -
| reduces this weird shame around it - allows us
| to correct bad answers - allows people to learn from
| others with the same questions - self manages by
| capacity because the people with time are the ones that can
| answer questions - produces an awesome collection of
| analytics: how many & what questions are being asked by who,
| Who is answering questions and about what?
|
| Remote work is a communication and cultural change that a lot
| of teams have done poorly. I think most teams decided when the
| pandemic hit: "oh we'll use teams or slack. That's enough" and
| never thought more about it.
| seadan83 wrote:
| Your team started out as in person?
|
| What kinds of things did you think about to transition to
| where you are? How did that transition happen?
| maestroia wrote:
| It's always difficult for people to ask for help. The best
| thing senior engineers can do is set the example and ask for
| help when they get stuck on something--even if it's something
| they could figure out on their own with some time.
| gavmor wrote:
| I had the rare privilege of pair-programming 40 hours a week
| for several years early in my career. This follows the extreme
| programming ethos of "everything in the limit," where pairing
| is "code review in the limit" and "mentorship in the limit," to
| say nothing of the oral tradition it imparts[0].
|
| Even pair-programming with my fellow juniors was both more
| productive and more educational than a rubber duck[1].
|
| I had the opportunity to sit down to dinner with some very
| junior devs at a family gathering, recently, and to hear of
| their isolation due to remote-work broke my heart. They simply
| have no idea what they're missing.
|
| 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PaWFYm0kEw
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
| breischl wrote:
| I think it can work great for some people. I did it for a few
| weeks at one point, and found it thoroughly unproductive. 90%
| of my time was spent waiting for somebody else to type
| something, or trying to verbally communicate something that
| would be better done in writing/code.
|
| Even now I find it incredibly off-putting to have somebody
| looking over my shoulder when I'm trying to work, to the
| point that I basically just can't. People have asked to watch
| me do something, and my response is that you can either watch
| me, or I can do it, but not both. It's like Heisenberg
| Uncertainty for work output.
| gavmor wrote:
| > waiting for somebody else to type
|
| > trying to verbally communicate something that would be
| better done in writing/code
|
| > somebody looking over my shoulder
|
| At the risk of sounding flippant, none of these activities
| comprise pair programming. What's better written _should_
| be, and the simplest way might be "can I just show you?"
| or, from a particularly well-atuned pair, "would you mind
| showing me?"
|
| "Waiting for someone else to type," in my experience, is
| either a good opportunity to finish a bit of thinking
| that'd I'd put off moments prior, or else premeditate on
| our next move. Sometimes, however, the typing is, as you
| alluded to, an attempt to communicate something, in which
| case _watching_ them type is roughly equivalent to
| _listening_ to a person in conversation, and therefore an
| opportunity to learn, catch bugs, etc. In other words, when
| I am pair-programming I am never waiting qua idling.
|
| And, lastly, I completely agree that "somebody looking over
| my shoulder" is an unnerving condition to code under. As
| purely ergonomic concern, "over one's shoulder" is not a
| healthy position from which to operate a computer. ;)
|
| But, seriously, it's not pair programming if you're not on
| equal footing (seating?), with equal access to mouse,
| keyboard, and monitor. Don't stand for someone standing
| behind you!
|
| I am sorry for the unpleasant experiences you've had. As a
| practitioner, I would not have subjected you to them. I am,
| frankly, vicariously irritated with whomever did.
| breischl wrote:
| "Looking over your shoulder" was just a figure of speech,
| not a literal description. And I suppose I could have
| grabbed the keyboard, but there's social niceties to
| navigate, everyone likes their keyboard & IDE set up
| different ways, and it's generally a PITA.
|
| Also the way I tend to code is never linear in a way that
| anybody else could follow. I write something, edit it,
| throw it away, put it back, rename it, hack out something
| I _know_ is buggy so I can see how it looks, and
| basically "thrash" my way to a solution that I like. That
| makes it essentially impossible for anybody to follow in
| real time, and having them try to point out errors would
| be counterproductive. In the later stages someone could
| help polish it, but even then I think it'd mostly be a
| waste of time.
|
| That's before we even get to things like dealing with
| interruptions, or answering other questions quickly.
| Ideally interruptions don't happen, but in practice they
| do, and I don't want to be wasting someone else's time.
|
| There's a lot I liked about XP, but I still think that
| (for some people) it's just a great way to make two devs
| produce the output of one intern.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Meh, I don't think this is an intrinsic quality of working in
| the same space. Sometimes it is, if you're very lucky, but my
| experience in offices was mostly wasteful interactions with
| people who weren't satisfied with me checking my messages
| periodically instead of instantly.
| mattnewton wrote:
| As a counterpoint, I have a hard time coding with other
| people, it's like part of my brain spends the whole
| interaction thinking about what they could be thinking and I
| usually can't shut this off. It's especially aggravated if
| the person isn't very familiar to me. For leetcode style
| interviews that means I basically memorized hundreds of kinds
| of problems and pattern match to them because thinking deeply
| while supervised just doesn't reliably happen for me.
|
| I know mentorship is important and spend quite a bit of time
| on it everywhere I work, including with pairing. But the
| costs to many senior people's productivity are very real and
| can't be stated lightly. Remote work has been a godsend,
| previously I would do my best work behind a closed office
| door, in the back of a company bus, or after hours at home
| and it's like having unlimited access to that zone.
| pnutjam wrote:
| A culture of good, clear documentation is critical.
| dakiol wrote:
| That's why one should hire juniors based on how well they
| communicate and less based on their skills to invert a binary
| tree or design a URL shortener service.
| ResearchCode wrote:
| There's an abundance of people that can talk but do less.
| Real tech talent are rare, not that you find them by
| algorithms quizzes.
| ravishi wrote:
| I had the opposite experience with junior devs on my team. The
| ones that knew how to communicate and ask for help thrived. It
| was easy to negotiate some head banging on the wall time while
| also pairing from time to time to discuss where they're going.
| I've seem them flourish in less than a year's time and be able
| to perform just like experienced devs.
| fendy3002 wrote:
| > A 10 second conversation could easily save hours of head-
| banging-into-wall type work for a junior SWE
|
| Agree, though sometimes the hours of head banging will benefit
| greatly to the skills of said junior.
|
| That aside, everyone should be encouraged to ask to company's
| developer forum (slack channel). That way, if the senior that's
| responsible to train the junior is busy, other less busy senior
| can help.
| mrits wrote:
| Reminds me of when I blew up on my partner when I told her
| I'm not going to tell her how to switch from Playstation to
| Roku on the TV for the 1000th time. She spent 2 minutes
| trying to figure out and actually now understands how it
| works.
| nmridul wrote:
| In my project (30+ members) we have team members located in
| multiple locations (6+ cities in 4 countries). And for the last
| 2+ years I am the only one working from my country. While our
| company is 500+ strong in this country, for this particular
| project I am the only one.
|
| So interactions with the project team is fully remote.
|
| I am sure even pre-covid many MNCs might have a similar
| structure with members spread across different location. Though
| coming to office, but project work happens remotely. Also have
| juniors joining the team.
|
| It might be difficult for juniors to get started. But not
| impossible to handle.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Its difficult - yes. But not impossible to handle.
|
| The problem with "difficult but not impossible" is that it
| requires special personality types to handle it.
|
| Some people can do it, but now you have a secondary problem
| in that you need to find a way to filter those people in the
| hiring pipeline. You also have a risk of hiring people who
| can't handle it and having to cut them and re-hire.
|
| This is why most "difficult but not impossible" conditions
| are reserved for special exceptions but aren't useful for
| general policies.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| Isn't the same thing true about working in an office?
| Certain personality types thrive while others suffer.
| freyes wrote:
| > it requires special personality types to handle it.
|
| I agree, and I don't see a problem with it.
|
| > [...], but aren't useful for general policies.
|
| offices are just optimizing for the loudest and more social
| people, this is a consequence of managers tending to be
| like that, I don't think that approach is useful for
| general policies neither.
| no_wizard wrote:
| I disagree its difficult. When the culture supports
| mentorship, onboarding and first year experience as high
| priority items with solid guidelines / process around them,
| its pretty easy.
|
| _but wait, that means changing cultural and such, that 's
| not easy_ is the response I often get to this, to which I say
| preemptively:
|
| That I would agree with, because the US business cultural is
| surprisingly stiff to changing things that would have
| favorable impact to workers, but that is IMO a different and
| separate discussion to the fact that this is a readily
| solvable problem.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| Well, it was always true for EMs that you could have a junior
| dev quietly spinning their wheels and not asking for help. The
| difference is before you could sometimes _see_ they were
| frustrated, and they could see _other people_ asking for help
| and know that 's just part of how you work. If they can't see
| it passively, you have to proactively show them.
|
| You can and should still have those 10 second conversations.
| We've got Slack huddles, screen sharing, VSCode Live Share for
| more complex pairing... the tools are really good now.
|
| That said, I tend to agree, a remote culture that doesn't
| respect the need for teaching and mentoring is going to be bad
| at it.
| pavedwalden wrote:
| When I worked in an office it was much easier to casually ask
| for quick help. It was often pretty obvious whether a senior
| engineer was busy and focused or between tasks, checking
| email etc. and the overhead/friction of these ten-second
| conversations is higher when you have to wait for a response
| on slack, then launch a video call, share screen... instead
| of just making eye contact and saying "got a sec?"
| throwbadubadu wrote:
| That's true, but I don't see how this relates to pandemic or
| being remote?
|
| Also not reaching out when getting totally stuck is a bad
| thing, but again unrelated?
| sokoloff wrote:
| There is a higher hurdle to setting up a zoom call than there
| was to waking up to a colleague who was at their desk and
| didn't look obviously busy. Solve that, and you probably
| solve a lot of low-grade communication challenges that are
| made worse by being remote as compared to in-same-office.
| throwbadubadu wrote:
| A 10 second convo is a two liner question I can shoot of
| via chat any time, not even needing to look for (and still
| fail or mistake) unbusy persons (and with a small team chat
| even broadcast to multiple people to also solve finding the
| unbusy person)? There are always many perspectives.. I have
| also seen introverts cope much better that way than
| approaching IRL. Heck you can even combine, "let me know
| when you are not busy to quickly explain me X" providing
| already the question async way, and then have the call or
| real desk meeting afterwards?
|
| > There is a higher hurdle to setting up a zoom call than
| there was to waking up to a colleague who was at their desk
|
| Also just not getting that, hitting the call button (or a
| real phone call) was always quicker and easier than walking
| two floors down to another room just to find the person not
| at its desk. Where is the hurdle?
|
| Really, just not getting it ;) What's to be solved? I see
| it may be a problem or hurdle for some, but for others the
| bigger hurdle is the opposite way. Don't extrapolate,
| generalize and state it like fact, because that is imo not
| true for everybody and may be the other way round.
| okaram wrote:
| Slacking 'hey, can we do a quick huddle?' takes about the
| same time as walking to someone's desk (less if the desk is
| far away;)
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| > I don't see how this relates to pandemic or being remote?
|
| There was more friction to asking quick questions, compared
| to being in office. This may not be the case any longer at
| all companies, as it's possible that some of them solved this
| with new communication practices.
| Brystephor wrote:
| I graduated from school in Spring 2020 and started working in Aug
| 2020. In that timeframe, I had not been inside an employers
| office more than 3 times. Since Mar 2023, we've had a "mandatory"
| 4 days in office every week. Here's what I've experienced since
| going the office:
|
| * Occasionally I'll get a good conversation with a teammate or
| manager about something technical, but the frequency has not gone
| up. The technical conversations are still scheduled on a calendar
| and happen at the same frequency. I really haven't experienced
| many people stopping at my desk and I think I've only stopped at
| the junior engineers desk to check in.
|
| * Socializing at work has not been my strong suit. I am pretty
| introverted when it comes to strangers (e.g. anyone who has not
| been introduced to me). I find the socializing to be more energy
| draining.
|
| * I walk to work. I like that typically. The walk can be...
| disturbing to say the least since I walk through downtown
| Seattle.
|
| * A lot of people in the office prefer to speak to each other in
| languages other than english. Everyone on my team (my manager +
| all my coworkers on my team) prefer speaking something other than
| english and do so unless I'm involved in the conversation. This
| surprised me and at times I find it frustrating because I wish I
| could know what they're chatting about when it's technical
| (certain keywords I can pickup on since they're the name of
| internal things).
|
| * working in office 4 days a week has given me something to
| really look forward to each week, and that's the WFH day.
|
| * I don't think my productivity has gone up. Some days it's
| definitely worse. Now there's an obligation to go sit and eat
| with others for 30min-1hr a day. Previously, I'd just bring my
| lunch to my desk and continue to work.
|
| I don't think my experience is the norm. But I certainly miss the
| pure WFH days.
| phowat wrote:
| I feel as if people have changed. I'm back in the office twice
| a week now and the good conversations and socializing parts
| just don't seem be happening like they were previously to the
| pandemic. I'm not sure what to think of it and maybe in some
| time, things will be more like it used to.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Partly because a lot of these companies "return to office"
| took away all the cool stuff like sitting next to your team,
| having an actual desk of your own, etc.
|
| I just want one single place that is actual 2019 normal. None
| of this BS hotdesk crap.
| antisthenes wrote:
| > A lot of people in the office prefer to speak to each other
| in languages other than english. Everyone on my team (my
| manager + all my coworkers on my team) prefer speaking
| something other than english and do so unless I'm involved in
| the conversation.
|
| If you're based in the US, this is just extremely rude.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| Management communication style is "Communicating less, but more
| frequently", the opposite of OP. This explains why management
| likes to see more people in offices.
| gottorf wrote:
| pg has written about this dichotomy years ago:
| http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
| dilawar wrote:
| Keep the managers working from home and get all devs to the
| office?
| ghaff wrote:
| There can actually be logic to that. Many managers spend most
| of their time in meetings--with people scattered around the
| world larger organizations. And they spend a lot of time with
| customers too. What's the point of having Ann office aside
| from occasional in person team events?
| Aurornis wrote:
| The headline says "remote work" but then the article immediately
| talks about "asynchrony work". These are two different topics.
|
| Async work can, and often should, happen in the office is well.
| Synchronous work is often required in remote work.
|
| A big stumbling block for remote work is the belief that remote
| means you shouldn't have to interact with other people much. Some
| people like that idea, while for others it's a big problem.
| Juniors especially struggle when their contact with other team
| members is forcibly reduced to narrow windows or very delayed
| responses to everything. Juniors shouldn't be reaching for help
| at the first signs of struggle, of course, but some of the async
| work zealots push the concept so far that juniors are expected to
| be almost solo developers.
|
| As someone who has successfully worked remote for years, I worry
| about all of these ideologic prescriptions for how remote work
| must look. Most of the remote work failures and return to office
| mandates I've heard about in local companies have their roots in
| unrealistic ideas about remote work, both from the company side
| and the employee side. Having done this for years I think it's
| important that people are still available for ad-hoc
| collaboration and conversation in company chat, within reason.
| Remote fails quickly when people take it as an invitation to
| isolate themselves and check e-mail or Slack once or twice per
| day.
|
| The only exceptions might be work that is highly repetitive and
| truly isolated, like an employee who can take an endless queue of
| similar tickets from Jira and do isolated work on the same tasks
| over and over again. Most engineering R&D work doesn't look this
| isolated, though, so the model fails when forced on more
| traditional software development.
|
| I've also experienced the opposite extreme, where managers go
| remote and feel obligated to schedule meetings all day long. I
| had a short-lived remote job where my calendar was over 50%
| recurring meetings before even scheduling time to discuss work
| with peers that week. Predictably, nothing got done at that
| company and they are reluctant to let anyone work remote now.
| briandswartz wrote:
| Well said.
|
| Curious: what does your current team / company do to enable the
| real-time ad-hoc conversations that need to happen? Are there
| conventions or tools that have helped?
|
| (full disclosure, we're building a platform that integrates
| with Calendar, Zoom, and Slack to try to solve this problem and
| let people turn to one another in real-time, without
| interrupting heads-down time. Would love to interview you for
| user research if you're up for it)
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